In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

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.

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

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

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

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

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