This paper is concerned with the grammatical mechanisms that interlocutors use to determine the reference of DPs. I present a class of nominal modifiers that I argue are (i) appositives, but nonetheless (ii) used to establish the reference of their anchor DP. These "identificational appositives" challenge theories of “restrictive” modification in which reference is fully determined by overt or contextually supplied material in the scope of a determiner (Elbourne 2005, Ahn 2022), as well as theories of the “non-restrictivity” of appositives (Potts 2004, Morzycki 2008, Leffel 2014). They thus raise questions about what notions of “reference” and “restrictivity” are needed to account for intuitions about referential DPs and their modifiers.
This paper presents an initial grammatical and discourse analysis of these appositives as a first step in understanding these questions. Specifically, I assimilate the modifiers to Onea and Ott (2022)’s analysis of nominal appositives (NAPs), treating them as fragment answers to implicit questions licensed by their containing utterance. New to my analysis will be evidence that the modifiers in (2) have the structure of elliptical copular clauses, and that the implicit questions these expressions answer are Questions of Identification (QoIs), which embed an equative semantics.