 Croce claims that drawing, sculpting, writing of music and so on are just as much ‘language’ as poetry, and all language is poetic; therefore ‘Philosophy of language and philosophy of art are the same thing’ (Aes. 142; author’s emphasis). The reason for this is that language is to be understood as expressive; ‘an emission of sounds which expresses nothing is not language’ (Aes. 143). From our perspective, we might regard Croce as arguing thus: (1) Referential semantics—scarcely mentioned by Croce—necessarily involves parts of speech. (2) However: