Several central concepts and ideas of language theory are analyzed, criticized and developed in the essays contained in this volume. They include the concept of quantifier and in particular a liberalization of the rules governing the interaction of quantifiers, the ambiguities of the concept of scope, the alleged Frege-Russell ambiguity of words for being, the notion of reference which turns out to be misunderstood by the so-called new theorists of reference , different modes of identification, the hegemony of generative syntax, recent theories of demonstratives, the relation of verificationist and truth-conditional meaning theories, the notion of metaphor, and differences between alethic and epistemic language-games. A bird’s-eye view of current language theory is provided by an examination of the differences between rule-oriented paradigms.