The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.