The symbolism of language is [...] twofold. [...] the greater part of its recognized content and structure is symbolic in a purely referential sense; in other words, the meaningful combination of vowels and consonants [...] derive their functional significance from the arbitrary associations between them and their meanings [...]. This completely dissociated type of symbolism is [...] of the very essence of linguistic form.
- Sapir (1929), a pag.61

So far as the referential symbolism of language is concerned, the words 'boy' and 'man' are discrete, incomparable phonetic entities, the sound-group b-o-y having no more to do with the sound-group m-a-n, in a possible scale of evaluated phonetic variants, than any randomly selected pair of sound-groups, say 'run' and 'bad', have to do with each other.
- Sapir (1929), a pag.61

[...] in actual speech referential and expressive symbolisms are pooled in a single expressive stream, the socialization of the tendency to expressive symbolism being far less extreme, in the great majority of languages, than of the tendency to fix references as such.
- Sapir (1929), a pag.62