Luisa Martí has a new paper on Spanish algunos:

• Luisa Martí. 2005. “Spanish algunos and the syntactic sensitivity of indefiniteness”.

  Abstract: This paper argues that the grammar must make it possible for indefinites to take scope outside of syntactic islands in a way that is sensitive to those islands. This is because there exist languages, like Spanish, in which whether an indefinite can take scope outside an island or not depends on the island it is embedded in. In particular, the Spanish plural indefinite “algunos” gives rise to both collective and distributive readings outside some, though not all, islands. The facts about “algunos” suggest that syntactically insensitive ways of achieving wide scope (e.g., choice functions, as in Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999, Reinhart 1997, or Winter 1997; domain restriction to a singleton set, as in Schwarzschild 2002 (cf. also Breheny 2003); referential interpretations, as in Fodor and Sag 1982, etc.) are, at the very least, not the only option languages can choose in order to achieve indefinite wide scope. I suggest treating “algunos” as an existential quantifier and deriving its wide scope out of the relevant syntactic islands via a QR rule that is sensitive to these islands and to the particulatities of the quantifiers involved (Relativized QR). I point out that in this kind of approach constraints need to be placed on the distribution of distributivity operators. I suggest that more cross-linguistic empirical work in this area is needed, since very often claims about the purported island insensitivity of indefinites are based on data that concern only a rather small set of islands.