Abstract This book focuses on how syntax and meaning go together. It argues that two seemingly unrelated questions are actually intimately related: whether thematic arguments should be severed from the verb and whether there is a syntactic difference between specifiers and complements. Thus the book combines research in the domain of argument structure with research on phrase structure. It is argued that it is possible to create a mapping from syntax to logical form such that each syntactic Spell-Out domain corresponds to a conjunct at logical form. The book shows how one can adjust Spell-Out in order to achieve this, an operation which turns out to be closely related to whether or not the grammar distinguishes between specifiers and complements. An entire chapter is devoted to the latter issue, where it is shown that specifiers qua specifiers are not required by the grammar. The mapping is argued to be transparent in the sense that each conjunct at logical form is directly connected to a specific syntactic domain. The book closes with a discussion of compositionality in some detail, arguing that a semantics based on conjunction is compositional.
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