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.

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.

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

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

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.

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