POSITION ANALYSIS. The procedure begins by noting the environments of each morpheme and by putting in one class all those morphemes that have similar distributions. However, in many cases the complete adherence to morpheme-distribution classes would lead to a relatively large number of different classes: 'hotel' would be 'N', 'think' would be 'V', and 'take' would be in a new class 'G' since it has roughly the distribution of both 'hotel' and 'think'. In order to avoid an unnecessarily large number of classes, we say that 'take' is a member of both 'N' and 'V'. This means that we are no longer studying the morpheme 'take' or 'think'. We are studying the positions, Bloomfield’s ‘privileges of occurrence’, common to both 'take', and 'think', or those common to both 'take' and 'hotel'. This means that we change over from correlating each morpheme with all its environments, to correlating selected environments (frames) with all the morphemes that enter them. The variables are now the positions, as is shown by the fact that the criterion for class membership is substitution. The element which occurs in a given class position may be a morpheme which occurs also in various other class positions. We merely select those positions in which many morphemes occur, and in terms of which we get the most convenient total description.
- Harris (1946), a pag.177