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.

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

When I speak it is in order to be heard.

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.

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