What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.