This article offers a critical examination of De Vries's (2006) account of appositive relatives, which treats appositive relatives and nominal appositions alike and assimilates both to coordinate structures. Its main focus is on the following properties of appositive relatives: (a) the category of the appositive head, (b) the case of the appositive head, (c) relative pronoun selection, (d) extraction phenomena, (e) the typology of specifying coordinators, and (f) the lack of prenominal appositives. It examines these properties from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective, contrasting De Vries's account with a version of an adjunction account.

This article argues in favor of a new type of Merge, Parallel Merge, which combines the properties of External Merge and Internal Merge. Parallel Merge creates symmetric, multidominant structures, which become antisymmetric in the course of the derivation.The main empirical goal of the article is to revive a multidominance approach to across-the-board wh -questions and to show that a number of otherwise puzzling properties of across-the-board questions follow naturally from such an account.