<P>This work is the culmination of an eighteen-year collaboration between Ken Hale andSamuel Jay Keyser on the study of the syntax of lexical items. It examines the hypothesis that thebehavior of lexical items may be explained in terms of a very small number of very simpleprinciples. In particular, a lexical item is assumed to project a syntactic configuration definedover just two relations, complement and specifier, where these configurations are constrained topreclude iteration and to permit only binary branching. The work examines this hypothesis bymethodically looking at a variety of constructions in English and other languages.</P>