The ENVIRONMENTor position of an element consists of the neighborhood, within an utterance, of elements which have been set up on the basis of the same fundamental procedures which were used in setting up the element in question.
- Harris (1951), a pag.15

The environments are themselves composed of segments; e.g. in a complete chart, the same segments appear both in the vertical segment axis and in the horizontal environment axis.
- Harris (1951), a pag.62

An intrinsic part of the definition of each morpheme is the environment for which it is defined: /siyliŋ/ by itself is undefined as to consisting of one morpheme ('ceiling') or two ('sealing'). But in 'We are going —.' /siyliŋ/ is defined as consisting of two morphemes, while in 'That — is made of plaster'. /siyliŋ/ is defined as one morpheme.
- Harris (1951), a pag.171

The environment in which one member of a unit rather than another occurs may in some cases be differentiable in terms of phonemes. In Attic Greek reduplication prefixes meaning ‘perfect aspect’ we have /me/ occurring only before morphemes beginning with /m/, /le/ only before morphemes beginning with /l/, etc. (/me'mene.ka/ ‘I have remained,’ /'leluka/ ‘I have loosed’). We group them all into one morpheme {C¹e} and can tell from the consonant following it which member occurs, i.e. which consonant replaces the C¹. In English, /Əl/ and /æl/ 'al' are members of one morpheme, /Əl / occurring when the morpheme is zero-stressed: 'national', 'nationality'; so are /telƏ/ and /tƏle/ in 'telegraph', 'telegraphy'. In all such alternations, the full vowel occurs where there is no zero stress, so that given the morpheme, {'al'} or {'tele'}, we can tell from the stress phonemes in the utterance which member of the morpheme occurs in the utterance.
- Harris (1951), a pag.209

A special case of environments which can be phonemically differentiated is that of the /v/→/f/ morphemic segment ‘noun’ which occurs after 'believe', 'live', and which is complementary to the /z/→/s/ ‘noun’ after 'to house', to the /ð/→/θ/ after 'breathe', etc. […]. We can group all these complementaries into one morpheme {unvoicing}.
- Harris (1951), a pag.209

[…] we will usually find that in some environments there is a greater number of contrasting segments than in others. E.g., if we consider the small portion shown here of the English chart, we find [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ, b, d, g] in [#—'V'], against which we can match only [p, t, k] in [s—'V']. If then we were to associate segments [p, t, k] with [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ] respectively, there would be no segments in the [s—'V'] environment to associate with segments [b, d, g]. The phonemes in which [b, d, g] are included would thus have no representative in the [s—'V'] position; they would be said not to occur there.
- Harris (1951), a pag.64