A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

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

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.

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

When I speak it is in order to be heard.

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