Campos (1986) argues that object drop in Spanish exhibits island effects. This claim has remained unchallenged up to today and is largely assumed in the literature. In this paper, I show that this characterization is not empirically correct: given a proper discourse context, null objects can easily appear within a syntactic island in Spanish. This observation constitutes a non-trivial problem for object drop analyses based on movement.

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the positive effect that modification has on the distribution of noun phrases in otherwise illicit environments. I focus on de nominals in French. By focusing on these nominals, whose distribution is altered by the addition of modifiers, the paper shows that modifiers can do much more than simply modify: they can change the syntactic and semantic status of a noun phrase. The licensing property of modifiers is an intriguing topic and has not been greatly discussed in the literature. I argue that modifiers can come to play the role of determiners in French as long as they are accompanied by a head de, which is the spell-out of a Cardinal head (see Lyons 1999). My proposal goes back to an old idea put forward by Damourette & Pichon (1911–1940)according to which, in modified contexts, de functions as one half of the article while the adjective functions as the other half. More generally, articles in French are seen as dual entities comprising of a specifier and a head. In the absence of the determiner les, an adjective can raise to the specifier of CardinalP. This is achieved via phrasal rather than head movement.

Russian has a family of reflexive constructions that have non-canonical syntax and express a variety of meanings that range from disposition (‘I feel like working’) to ability (‘I cannot work here’) and generic assessment of quality (‘I work well here’). Previous analyses assume that these constructions are derived by a regular syntactic rule and postulate a null modal in the structure to account for their semantics (Benedicto 1995, Franks 1995, Rivero & Arregui 2012). Focusing on the ‘feel like’ construction, I show that derivational analyses have difficulty explaining its idiosyncratic properties, including non-canonical agreement (independent of the structural subject), as well as the interpretation of aspect. Moreover, derivational analyses overgeneralize, since only a subset of predicates occur in the ‘feel like’ construction in Russian, as the data from the Russian National Corpus indicate. In order to account for their idiosyncratic properties and semi-productivity, I propose that the ‘feel like’ construction and its kin are stored in the lexicon as constructions (Goldberg 1995; Jackendoff 1997, 2008). The proposed analysis clarifies the status of reflexive constructions in Russian and establishes the scope of cross-linguistic semantic variation by comparing reflexives in Russian to that in other Slavic languages.