In this short paper, I introduce a new theory of the ingredients of semantic composition in the verb phrase that I recently proposed in Ramchand (2018), and argue that although it was proposed in that work to deal with a central problem in the cartographic layering of meaning found in all of the world’s languages, it turns out to be well suited to creating a common system for integrating symbolic content in human languages across modalities. Specifically, the design features of the solution proposed allow the simultaneous integration of both descriptive and demonstrative content (in the sense of Davidson 2015), and can be adapted to both onomatopæic and co-gestural effects in spoken languages. The system also allows one to formulate explicit hypotheses concerning the commonalities and differences between languagesin the spoken and signed modalities respectively.