ABSTRACT
The author shows that a general correspondence between meanings and structural levels can also be found to the little-studied domain of the internal structure of adjective phrases. A better syntactic representation would have the noun and its modifiers as complements of the determiner, which becomes the topmost head of the noun phrase. The denotation of the noun phrase as a whole will depend on three factors: whether the topmost projection is present or missing; whether the topmost projection, when present, is occupied by lexical material; whether a lexically filled topmost projection is interpreted in situ, or undergoes the operation of 'Quantifier Raising' (QR) and Quantifier Construal (QC). These settings will give the difference between predicate nominals and argument nominals, between 'strongly' and 'weakly' quantified noun phrases, in the sense of Milsark, and between proper names and strong quantifiers.
