Abstract The hypothesis initially defended in [Abney, S.P., 1987. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspects. Ph.D. dissertation, MIT] that determiners, quantifiers, and adjectives are heads and NP is their syntactic complement became one of the standard analyses within P&P and early minimalist syntax, but, examined in an unprejudiced way, causes more difficulties than it solves at both the empirical and the conceptual level. Without rejecting the head status of articles and the DP view of nominals, Kayne [Kayne, R., 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA], Cinque [Cinque, G., 1995. On the evidence for partial N-movement in the Romance noun phrase. In: Cinque, G. (Ed.), Italian Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 287–309] and others have subsequently proposed that demonstratives, quantifiers, possessives, and adjectives be considered phrasal specifiers of various functional projections, rather than heads, with only articles treated as heads of DP, and such is now the standard view within Chomskian generative grammar, but the specifier theory is itself subject to serious objections. This work evaluates afresh the pros and cons of both accounts, but finally rejects them to return to the earlier NP analysis of NPs and the traditional view of articles, demonstratives, quantifiers, adjectives, PPs and relative clauses as modifiers of the noun, which, under the theory of modification presented in [Escribano, J.L.G., 2004. Head-final effects and the nature of modification. Journal of Linguistics 40, 1–43], accounts for the facts quite well and meets the Occamian ideals of Minimalist Theory rather better than current competitors.