This thesis elucidates the elements that build the relationship between sound and meaning in speech and contributes theoretically and methodologically to the analysis of the oral expression. The symbolism of sounds, the style and the expression of emotions and attitudes are discussed from the point of view of speech. The models of communication ?The Live Voice? and ?Covariance and Configuration? help interpret the expressive potential of the speech. The corpus is constituted by the poem ?I-Juca Pirama? performed by a professional actor. The data analysis dwells upon its auditive-perceptive and acoustic-phonetic analysis together with the parallelism between phonic materialization and the meaning. The qualitative analysis deals with the study the qualities of voice, the allophones of /r/ and the loudness. The measurement of the duration of speech segments, in ms, was carried out in order to analyse speech and articulation rates, rhythm and continuity. Furthermore, fundamental frequency values, in Hz, of vowel segments in words and phrases were obtained to investigate intonation aspects. The confrontation of duration and f0 contours are used to interpret the data of the prosodic analysis. We favor the conception that the relationship between sound and meaning in speech is either motivated or arbitrary, used consciously or unconsciously, historically established or continuously changed within culture, by the demotivation or remotivation processes of the sign. The individual promotes in practical activities the indexes of the nature of gestures, known as vocal gestures, which are composed by the interaction (and impossible dissociation) of prosodic elements (quality and dynamics of voice) with the phonetic elements (vowels and consonants) and non-verbal sounds produced in the communication (breathing, mouth and tongue sounds). As body movements of one or more structures of the vocal tract that move through time and space, in synchronic or non-synchronic ways, the vocal gestures are used to reduce tension being or not the voluntary reproduction an emotion or mark the presence of an emotion. The vocal gestures, as symbolic elements, belong to the system of expressive signs that respond to a universal sound symbolism. They can represent other animate or inanimate objects that are either associated by similarity or by functional analogy, may have a specific configuration and/or are subject to the activation of the organism when express linguistic information or an emotion or an attitude. The vocal gestures, as stylistical facts, represent the dual character of the language. They are practical trademarks of the job of the locutor who shows his/her singularity and subjectivity in a recurrent and salient way in the speech, building and being built by meaning, one time playing the main role, other times a secondary role. The vocal gestures, as physiologic and dynamic linguistic elements carry out in the individual expression the subjective and contextual demands that reflect in the variability of language and, therefore, integrate the voice into the universe of the language