Parenthesis : Syntactic Integration or Orphanage? A Rejoinder to Ott (2016)

Griffiths & De Vries (G&dV, 2013) offer an argument in favor of treating appositive relative clauses (ARCs) as syntactically integrated into their hosts which revolves around the distribution of ARCs in clausal ellipsis environments. In a recent reply to G&dV, Ott (2016) counters this specific argument, discards the more general integration analysis adopted by G&dV on conceptual grounds, and contends that an orphanage analysis of ARCs provides a more parsimonious explanation for the data that G&dV introduce. 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.