Reformulative appositions and clausal ellipsis

•Reformulative appositions (RAs) and their anchors are conjoined.•Regular RAs are not orphans or stripped clausal conjuncts.•An adequate definition of RAs revolves around isomorphism.•Non-reformulative appositions are only derived from parenthetical copular clauses.•Obligatory ellipsis is banned in appositional environments.

I claim that, from a syntactic perspective, reformulative appositions and their host clause anchors are coordinated in the same standard manner as the DPs in a sentence like Bill and Ben slept. I demonstrate that this ‘what you see is what you get’ low coordination account of reformulative apposition confers greater explanatory power than analyses that propose that reformulative appositions are contained within parenthetical clauses to which clausal ellipsis is applied.