This procedure develops representations for those features of speech such as tone or stress sequences and other contours (‘secondary phonemes’, prosodemes) which extend over whole utterances, whether, or not these contours have independent meanings. Extraction of these contours as distinct single elements leaves in the utterance a sequence of segments which are devoid of such features as tone and stress, and which are in fact the traditional positional variants of phonemes.
- Harris (1951), a pag.45

From the segments of each utterance we extract each feature which is such that relatively few fixed sequences of the various grades of that feature occur in all our utterances. We call that feature a long component (or a contour) over the utterance.
- Harris (1951), a pag.49

The extraction of these contours from the segments of every utterance is particularly important because in many languages some of the contours will turn out later to constitute suprasegmental contour morphemes (intonation, etc. ) which may occur elsewhere separately from the morphemes constituted by the segmental remnants. For example, if we extract the tone contour out of the segments of 'I’m going.' and 'He isn’t.' we get the tone sequence '020' for each; we can later identify this tone contour as a morpheme indicating assertion which occurs in both of these utterances.
- Harris (1951), a pag.52

The contours can be defined as succession of shorter phonemic elements, or as superpositions of phonemic elements each of which is as long as the contour itself.
- Harris (1951), a pag.58

In some languages it may be possible to say that certain contours change from morpheme to successive morpheme, or that certain contours, long components such as vowel harmony, phonemes, or phoneme sequences (clusters, etc.) correlate with the boundary of a morpheme. Thus, in English long components do not occur within a morpheme; however, they occur across morpheme boundary, e.g. the /nn/ in 'pen-knife'. Any sound feature whose occurrence is limited in terms of a morphological segment (e.g. one morpheme) can be indicated by a juncture phoneme or an automatically placeable boundary mark which will indicate both the feature in question and the morphological boundary.
- Harris (1951), a pag.175

The contours indicate in general the boundaries of the domains over which they extend, although in some cases, e.g. the duration of phonemes, the boundary points are much harder to discover, and perhaps less fixed, than the character of the contour.
- Harris (1951), a pag.346