The main topic of this work is the interaction between syntactic structure and meaning within the noun phrase, with data drawn primarily from English and Italian. The book proposes a strict mapping between semantic types and syntactic projections (or "layers") within the noun phrase, and assigns different positions to 'strong' determiners (in the sense of Milsark, 1974), and determiners which may appear in predicate nominals. The analysis is cast in Government and Binding theory, with notions from the minimalist program of Chomsky (1992, 1994), and from Montague grammar.