Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary - apposition

 noun  Date: 15th century  1.  a. a grammatical construction in which two usually adjacent nouns having the same referent stand in the same syntactical relation to the rest of a sentence (as the poet and Burns in “a biography of the poet Burns”)  b. the relation of one of such a pair of nouns or noun equivalents to the other  2.  a. an act or instance of apposing; specifically the deposition of successive layers upon those already present (as in cell walls)  b. the state of being apposed  • ~al adjective