 These are of course complex issues and they offer a lens through which to appreciate the erstwhile debate on the ontology of language but with a contemporary and more focused flavor. Not all of the authors who work on the philosophy of words consider the role of linguistic theory to be central. Hence their work might be related but it does not quite qualify as the philosophy of linguistics, where this is viewed as a subfield of the philosophy of science. By contrast, we have focused on the authors who directly engage with linguistic theory in their accounts of the ontology of SLEs. There is also no clear mapping between the various ontological accounts mentioned here and the characterizations of linguistic theorizing in terms of Externalism, Emergentism and Essentialism. No particular metaphysical view unifies any of our three groupings. For example, not all Externalists incline toward nominalism; numerous Emergentists as well as most Essentialists take linguistics to be about mental phenomena; and our Essentialists include Katz’s platonism alongside the Chomskyan ‘I-language’ advocates and pluralists embrace aspects of all of the above.