In Griffiths and De Vries 2013 (G&dV), we offer an argument in favor of treating appositive relative clauses (ARCs) as syntactically integrated into their hosts, an argument that revolves around the distribution of ARCs in clausal ellipsis environments. In a reply, Ott (2016) counters this specific argument, rejects the more general integration analysis adopted in G&dV on conceptual grounds, and contends that an orphanage analysis of ARCs provides a more parsimonious explanation for the data introduced there. In this rejoinder, we demonstrate that, while Ott presents some relevant data and provides welcome discussion, his specific counterargument does not withstand scrutiny. We also defend the integration approach to ARCs on conceptual and empirical grounds and examine the orphanage analysis of ARCs, arguing that such an approach has conceptual and empirical inadequacies that no integration approach exhibits.

Using Takahashi and Fox 2005 as an exemplar, this article argues that analyses of English ellipsis that make recourse to a MaxElide constraint (first introduced in Merchant 2008 ) are untenable, and that one must look beyond MaxElide to explain the distribution of acceptability in the “rebinding” elliptical constructions that MaxElide was originally invoked to explain. A novel analysis is outlined that attributes the unacceptability observed in the rebinding dataset to an inability to satisfy a more restrictive, reflexive version of Takahashi and Fox’s parallelism condition on ellipsis recoverability. More broadly, the success of this analysis supports the notion that clausal and nonclausal ellipsis are governed by distinct recoverability conditions. This article therefore provides support for a nonunitary approach to the semantic licensing of ellipsis.