The authors explore some of the ways in which standardization, ideology and linguistics are interrelated. Through a number of case studies they show how concepts such as grammaticality and structural change covertly rely on a false conceptualization of language, one that derives ultimately from standardization.

This is an in-depth analysis of dramatization as method in the work of Deleuze and Guattari. It provides an account of the value of this method for the study of the political with particular emphasis on the relationship between politics and art.

The author questions the status quo in Romance linguistics. The Ergative/Unaccusative syntactic approach has been accepted as the orthodox analytical paradigm. He re-examines both the theoretical imperative and the empirical evidence for that approach, drawing on a large amount of new and surprising data from Italian, Spanish, French and Catalan.

Linguistic signs do not coincide with intended or interpreted meanings. For relevance theory, this theoretical commonplace merely demonstrates the inferential nature of language. For Paul de Man, on the contrary, it suggested that language is unstable, random, arbitrary, mechanical, ironic and inhuman. This book seeks to show that relevance theory is a more plausible account of communication, cognition and literary interpretation than the deconstructionist theory de Man elaborated from readings of Rousseau, Hegel and Nietzsche.