This chapter integrates the treatments of quantifier phrases, genitives, and pronouns from Chapters 6 and 7 in a more detailed assignment-variable-based layered n analysis of noun phrases. Applications to additional effects associated with “specificity” are explored, including presuppositional vs. nonpresuppositional uses, contextual domain restriction, weak vs. strong quantifiers, existential ‘there’ sentences, and modal independence. Possibilities for nonlocal readings of world arguments are captured in a general phase-based syntax. An alternative matching analysis of relative clauses is provided, which improves on the head-raising account from Chapter 6. A semantics incorporating events is briefly considered in a parallel layered v analysis of verb phrases.

This chapter develops an improved assignment-variable-based compositional semantics for head-raising analyses of restrictive relative clauses, and applies the account to certain types of pronominal anaphora. The speculative choice-function based analysis of names from Chapter 4 is extended to certain indefinites, relative words, and donkey pronouns. An analysis of donkey pronouns as copies of their linguistic antecedent is supported by crosslinguistic data. Nominal quantifiers are treated as introducing quantification over assignments. The proposed semantics for quantifiers helps capture linguistic shifting data in universal, existential, and asymmetric readings of donkey sentences. Additional composition rules or principles for interpreting reconstructed phrases aren’t required (e.g., Predicate Abstraction, Predicate Modification, Trace Conversion). The semantics is fully compositional. Critical challenges are discussed.

This chapter extends the assignment-variable-based analysis of headed relative constructions in Chapter 6 to quantifier phrases with nonrelative complements. Crosslinguistic diachronic, morphological, and syntactic data are examined in support of a generalized D+XP analysis. Applications of the assignment-quantificational syntax/semantics for quantifier phrases include phenomena with “specificity,” contextual domain restriction, and distinctions between modifier (“free R”) readings and argument (“inherent R”) readings of genitives. The treatment of donkey pronouns in Chapter 6 is extended to bound-variable readings, reflexives, and other types of apparent non-c-command anaphora, such as with genitive binding and inverse linking. The account’s distinction between trace-binding and pronoun-binding is exploited in a speculative account of weak crossover.