 Theories of words, phonemes, and other linguistic entities are tied to the metaphysics of language more generally, but also are subjects of separate inquiries. The extent to which these are questions for social ontology, rather than, say, the metaphysics of psychological states, depends in part on whether and how language is public. Kaplan (1990), for instance, argues that words are entities extended over time and across a population: “utterances and inscriptions are stages of words, which are the continuants made up of these interpersonal stages”. This approach is in contrast to type-token theories, some of which regard word-types to be socially individuated, and others individualistically individuated (see Hugly &amp; Sayward 1981, Bromberger 1989, McCulloch 1991, Cappelen 1999, Wetzel 2009, Hawthorne &amp; Lepore 2011). The nature of words is also tied to the question of whether a word’s meaning is essential to it (Kaplan 1990, Alward 2005, Simchen 2012), and to the distinctions between various types of words in linguistics, such as phonological words, syntactic atoms, morphological words, and lexical words (see Selkirk 1984, Di Sciullo &amp; Williams 1987, Hall 1999, Raffelsiefen 1999, Julien 2007). Similar issues arise in connection with sentences, utterances, and quotation (Davidson 1979, J. Bennett 1988, Washington 1992, Cappelen &amp; Lepore 1997, Recanati 2001, García-Carpintero 2004b, Predelli 2008, Saka 2013).