The Critical Linguistic Questions. Language is a system of signs.
Language is a system of symbolic signs.
In spoken language the form of the sign is its sound. The study of sounds is phonetics from Greek fone 'sound'. The study of meaning is semantics from Greek sema 'sign' and semain-ein 'to mean, to signify'. And the mome rath s outgrabe. It is the grammatical markers in boldface that tell us that the poem is English.