e Fleeting DP in Bulgarian and Macedonian: e View From Leſt-Branch Extraction Jelena Stojković * Abstract is paper is concerned with restrictions on Leſt-Branch Extraction (LBE) in Bulgarian and Macedonian, the only two Slavic languages with articles. e data indicate that the availability of LBE is related to the number of modifiers, and thus require a revision of the generalisation that all languages with articles disallow LBE. Following Martinović (2019), Calabrese & Pescarini (2014), a solution based on the order of operations is proposed, connecting the availability of LBE to the idea that projections can be removed via syntactic operations such as Exfoliation (Pesetsky 2019). e application of Exfoliation depends on the relative timing of article placement, which in turn is performed via a post-syntactic operation of Generalised Lowering (Embick & Noyer 2001). Exfoliation and subsequently LBE are fed by an early application of Lowering, assumed to be able to interleave narrow syntax (Martinović 2019), but if applied late, Lowering counter-feeds these two operations. 1. Introduction ere has been a debate in recent years over whether the DP is projected universally in all languages, or whether there is parametric variation among languages with respect to its existence. Bošković (2005, 2008, 2014c, et seq.) has argued for the latter option, claiming that there is a fundamental difference between languages with and without the definite article. By recourse to a variety of syntactic phenomena, one of them being Leſt-Branch Extraction (henceforth: LBE), 1 he argues that the differences arise from the fact that the * Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the workshop Shrinking Trees in Morphology (April 2018) and Formal Description of Slavic Languages 12 (December 2018); I thank the audiences for helpful feedback. I am especially grateful to Martin Salzmann, David Pesetsky, Gereon Müller, Imke Driemel, Petr Biskup, and John Bailyn for their comments on the paper. A very special type of gratitude goes to my Bulgarian and Macedonian informants. All remaining errors and inconsistencies are my own. Structure Removal, 343–384 Andrew Murphy (ed.) Linguistische Arbeits Berichte 94, Universität Leipzig 2019 1 e criteria he uses to draw the line between the two types of languages are phenomena such as clitic doubling, scrambling effects, multiple wh-fronting, neg-raising, transitive nominals