This paper offers a comprehensive and uniform theory of island repair in clausal ellipsis (sluicing and fragments). We show that the correct generalization defines the repairing and the nonrepairing types of TP ellipsis in terms of contrastivity: TP ellipsis with contrastive remnants does not repair islands, whereas TP ellipsis with noncontrastive remnants does. Contrary to the influential account of Merchant (), we base our explanation for the island sensitivity of contrastive fragments entirely on the notion of Parallelism. The island insensitivity of noncontrastive remnants, on the other hand, follows from the island node being deleted at PF. With this we simplify the theory of islands, and, by treating the different types of clausal ellipsis on a par, we move away from the construction‐specific study of ellipsis that has characterized syntactic theorizing for the last forty years.

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This paper argues that the meaning of a clausal ellipsis site can only be recovered from a syntactically derived question, regardless of whether this question is explicitly uttered or is merely pragmatically inferred. This entails that the meaning of a clausal ellipsis site cannot be recovered from an inferred question q in a language L if q is syntactically ill-formed in L. I demonstrate that this restriction on recoverability can account for Merchant’s (2001; 2004) Preposition-Stranding Generalisation and for the observation that fragments appear to be sensitive to syntactic islands (Merchant 2004; Abels 2011; Barros et al. 2014; 2015) without any mention of whether remnants of clausal ellipsis themselves undergo movement. Because there is no need to stipulate that remnants themselves undergo (often exceptional) movement under this approach, a theory of clausal ellipsis modelled on Cable’s (2010) Q-based analysis of wh-questions is developed that permits non-pronunciation “around” designated phrases. This approach is shown to be preferred on many occasions to the predominant movement-based analysis (Merchant 2004), which is too restrictive and must frequently resort to the notion of ellipsis repair.

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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.