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Do I need commas in the following sentences?

They sailed down a river, The Yangtze, to get to their destination.

He built a sprawling palace, the Grand Trianon, using decorative ceramic tiles.
user1411469
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2 Answers2

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Yes. You have used non-restrictive clauses in those sentences. Clauses that are non-essential, parenthetical, or asides, are always set off by commas.

Note that you could have written these without such clauses, and therefore, without commas:

They sailed down the Yangtze River to get to their destination.

He built the sprawling Grand Trianon palace using decorative ceramic tiles.

user8356
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  • Aren't they restrictive/essential because they specify which river and which palace? – user1411469 Apr 07 '17 at 15:39
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    That's not what non-restrictive means. The sentence doesn't fall apart (gramatically, syntax-wise, not in the sense of telling a story) if you leave them out:

    They sailed down a river to get to their destination.

    See? The words work perfectly fine that way. That's why it's a non-restrictive clause.

     – user8356 Apr 07 '17 at 15:46
  • In the sentence "The man who committed the crime went to jail," the phrase "who committed the crime" is essential and doesn't require commas. Yet, the sentence doesn't fall apart if you take it out. According to your definition, we would commas around it. ??? – user1411469 Apr 07 '17 at 16:36
  • @user1411469, I started to write a comment and then expanded it into a full answer, below, that may help. Check it out and see if it provides any more clarity. In short, the thing that "falls apart" if you take out restrictive clauses (but not non-restrictive ones) is the ability to identify the referent. It gets tricky because in some cases there's only a singular referent and so both parts (e.g. "a river" and "the Yangtze") are naming the same real thing, with the result that neither of them are essential and either could be dropped. – MDHunter Apr 07 '17 at 20:56
  • Actually, the example given could be either a non-restrictive or a restrictive clause:

    The man, who committed the crime, went to jail. (He did commit a crime, by the way -- non-restrictive)

    The man who committed the crime went to jail (not the other man we were talking about, the one who didn't commit the crime and didn't go to jail).

     – user8356 Apr 07 '17 at 21:10
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Yes, those commas are necessary. You have used a construction called the non-restrictive appositive.

Why is it non-restrictive even though it seems essential, somwhow? In the sentence, "They sailed down a river, the Yangtze, to get to their destination" the words a river and the Yangtze identify exactly the same real thing in the world. Note that the positions of the appositive phrases could be swapped and that arguably this would make the non-restrictiveness more clear. "They sailed down the Yangtze, a river, to get to their destination." Written that way, it is obvious that the phrase "a river" is not essential to identifying the Yangtze as the river they sailed down because the Yangtze is, in a sense, already a river, whether or not the reader knows this. Just as, in the original formulation, the river they sailed down was already the Yangtze. Adding "the Yangtze" in commas provided the reader information she might not have otherwise known, but it was not essential to establishing the identity of the river and the Yangtze in the real world.

For the purposes of determining restrictiveness, the "essentialness" of a clause is independent of the evaluation of any ostensible pragmatic context. Take the example, "Jane Smith, noted biologist, has arrived." It's easy to imagine the following exchange:

P1: "Jane Smith has arrived."
P2: "What? Who?"
P1: "Uh... sorry. Jane Smith, noted biologist, has arrived."
P2: "Oh, right. We should probably get the projector soon."

In this case, it looks like "noted biologist" was essential to determine the meaning of "Jane Smith" and that, therefore, "noted biologist" is restrictive, should not be in commas, and the whole sentence should be rewritten as "Noted biologist Jane Smith has arrived." However, the reason Wikipedia identifies that sort of "false title" as controversial is because the function of the phrase "noted biologist" in this sentence syntactically is not essential to identifying the subject who arrived. The Jane Smith who arrived was always already the noted biologist. The author makes this so by use of the commas. That, upon analysis, it seems "essential" for Person 2 is only a result of the reader's attempt to use a feature of the pragmatic context to determine the semantic meaning of the sentence.

MDHunter
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