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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.