In this paper we defend non-unified approaches to subject and adjunct islands. We review syntactic and extrasyntactic approaches as well as unified and non-unified approaches to these two island effects. Since Huang (1982), these two islands have been treated as two strong island effects (i.e., extraction out of these domains is uniformly banned). This idea was inherited in some Minimalist literature (e.g, Nunes & Uriagereka 2000). However, following Stepanov (2007), much recent Minimalist literature pursues non-unified analyses wherein the two islands have distinct explanations. The opposite situation holds for recent extrasyntactic approaches, which seem to prefer a unified analysis. We argue that existing unified extrasyntactic approaches are inadequate, and that the data call for a non-unified approach involving both syntactic and extrasyntactic principles.

I argue that the well-known islandhood of adjunct prepositional phrases does not substantially derive from their adjuncthood. Instead, islandhood of these domains derives from various factors that are orthogonal to the argument/adjunct distinction, including PP-internal structure, lexical properties of prepositions, and semantico-pragmatic construal. To show this, I demonstrate that PP-islandhood cross-cuts the argument/adjunct distinction. In particular, (i) PPs with NP complements are generally not islands, (ii) PPs with tensed clausal complements are generally (strong) islands, and (iii) PPs with gerundive complements are generally (weak) islands. These generalizations hold whether or not the relevant PP has a prototypical adjunct function.

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In this article, I develop a theory of how a syntactically unintegrated parenthetical is integrated with its host at the sensorimotor interface. First, I observe that the niches open to parentheticals, traditionally described in syntactic terms, are more accurately described in the terms of prosodic‐hierarchy theory. In particular, I show that a niche corresponds to a phonological‐phrase boundary. I then argue that this follows if a parenthetical is constructed in a separate syntactic workspace and is integrated with its host at the sensorimotor interface (without ever being integrated in narrow syntax) in a manner that is constrained by (i) certain properties of the syntactic workspace, (ii) the No‐Tampering Condition, and (iii) certain properties of the syntax–phonology mapping.