This article shows that parasitic ellipsis, originally described by Fitzgibbons (2014) as an otherwise illicit ellipsis of the complement of prepositions that becomes grammatical in the context of gapping in Russian, is a much more general phenomenon: it occurs in other languages (English, German) and after a number of other categories as well (C, A, N and V). By comparing parasitic ellipsis with parasitic gaps a number of properties of parasitism is discussed and it is argued that the parasitic ellipsis construction is better viewed as a single process, not two separate but dependent ones. Such an analysis is provided within the framework of Minimalist Grammars (Stabler 1997).