The central position of descriptive linguistics in respect to the other linguistic disciplines and to the relationships between linguistics and other sciences, makes it important to have clear methods of work in this field, methods which will not impose a fixed system upon various languages, yet will tell more about each language than will a mere catalogue of sounds and forms. The greatest use of such explicit structural descriptions will be in the cataloguing of language structures, and in the comparing of structural types.These descriptions will, however, be also important for historical linguistics and dialect geography; for the relation of language to culture and personality, and to phonetics and semantics; and for the comparison of language structure with systems of logic.
- Harris (1951), a pag.3

Descriptive linguistics, as the term has come to be used, is a particular field of inquiry which deals not with the whole of speech activities, but with the regularities in certain features of speech.
- Harris (1951), a pag.5

The universe of discourse for a descriptive linguistic investigation is a single language or dialect. These investigations are carried out for the speech of one particular person, or one community of dialectically identical persons, at a time. Even though any dialect or language may vary slightly with time or with replacement of informants, it is in principle held constant throughout the investigation, so that the resulting system of elements and statements applies to one particular dialect.
- Harris (1951), a pag.9

Investigations in descriptive linguistics are usually conducted with reference to any number of whole utterances. Many of the results apply explicitly to whole utterance. Even when studies of particular interrelations among phonemes or morpheme classes are carried out, the frame within which these interrelations occur is usually referred ultimately to their position within an utterance. This is due to the fact that most of the data consists (by definition) of whole utterances, including longer stretches which can be described as sequences of whole utterances. […] On the other hand, stretches longer than one utterance are not usually considered in current descriptive linguistics.
- Harris (1951), a pag.11

Investigation in descriptive linguistics consists of recording utterances in a single dialect and analyzing the recorded material.
- Harris (1951), a pag.12

In investigations in descriptive linguistics, linguistic elements are associated with particular features of the speech behavior in question, and the relations among these elements are studied.
- Harris (1951), a pag.16

The over-all purpose of work in descriptive linguistics is to obtain a compact one-one representation of the stock of utterances in the corpus. Since the representation of an utterance or its parts is based on a comparison of utterances, it is really a representation of distinctions. It is this representation of differences which gives us discrete combinatorial elements (each representing a minimal difference). A non-comparative study of speech behavior would probably deal with complex continuous changes, rather than with discrete elements.
- Harris (1951), a pag.366