This syntactic and textual study examines the various ways apposition can be defined. German grammars and linguistic studies devoted to apposition vary widely in the range of that notion, which is still very much under the influence of grammatical tradition. The various criteria which appear in definitions (case agreement, adjacency, referential identity, non-restrictiveness, deletability, similarity to a grammatical clause, subject-predicate relation) are critically examined, which leads to a redefinition of the object of our study, both intensionally and extentionally: noun-based detached constructions can be seen as additional averbal predications in which the appositive NP2 can always be morphosyntactically positioned immediately to the right of the NP1 base. Our definition makes it possible to distinguish detached constructions from phenomena which are usually considered as appositive (als- or wie-introduced NPs, dislocations, absolute constructions).NP2 displacement away from NP1 results from the distribution and prioritization of information within utterances, and further at the textual level. Detached constructions provide relevant elements for textual comprehension. This explanatory function creates and maintains a high level of mutual comprehension between the speaker/writer and the reader, which the speaker can use for argumentative purposes.The corpus of our study (vol. 2) is made up of newspaper and magazine articles and contemporary literary texts.