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

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

Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve.

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

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

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

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.