The goal of this squib is to explain an intriguing data set involving appositives and fragment answers, thereby providing support for the idea that appositives, and by extension parentheses more generally, are related to the host clause in syntax, via parenthetical coordination.
Appositives include appositions and appositive relative clauses (ARCs), such as those illustrated in (1a) and (1b), respectively. In both examples, the anchor is John.
Various approaches to these construction types abound in the literature (see De Vries 2006, Dehé and Kavalova 2007, Heringa 2011:122–139, and Kluck 2012 for overviews). We split these lines of thought asunder. What is of special interest is the question of whether and how an appositive is related to its anchor. Orphanage approaches maintain that appositives are syntactically isolated from their anchor; integration approaches do assume a structural relationship, albeit possibly of a special kind....