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.

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.

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

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.

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