Investigation in descriptive linguistics consists of recording utterances in a single dialect and analyzing the recorded material. The stock of recorded utterances constitutes the corpus of data, and the analysis which is made of it is a compact description of the distribution of elements within it. The corpus does not, of course, have to be closed before analysis begins.
- Harris (1951), a pag.12

[…] it will frequently be the case that the sum of total environments of a morpheme taken in one corpus will differ from the sum of total environments of that very morpheme taken in another corpus of the same language […] the interest in our analysis of the corpus derives primarily from the fact that it can serve as a predictive sample of the language […] and the high probability of variation between one corpus and another means that the corpus which up to this point had served as a satisfactory sample of the language can no longer serve thus in the matter of the exact environments of morphemes.
- Harris (1951), a pag.244

[…] even a corpus large enough to yield almost all the morphemes of the language will, in most cases, fail to give us anything like all the environments of each morpheme.
- Harris (1951), a pag.253

[…] 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.
- Harris (1951), a pag.334