[…] in any corpus of material, it is possible to identify every linguistic element solely in terms of non-zero stretches of speech. For that matter, any corpus could be described in terms of elements each of which represents only the addition (to the utterance in which it occurs) of some stretch of speech. […] Even in the simpler situations, when we say that two stretches of speech contain an identical additive element, we may not wish to state what part of each stretch represents that element […]; in such cases the linguistic element represents the difference between two segments (as 'F' represents the difference between Hebrew 'hu' ‘he’ and 'hi' ‘she’).
- Harris (1951), a pag.334