[…] Bloomfield defined the word in general as a minimum utterance […].
- Harris (1951), a pag.327, n.5

[…] members of the construction sometimes or never constitute by themselves the whole utterance in which they are contained. Or we can say that almost all English utterances contain at least one of the free classes ('A, N ¹, V ¹, D', etc.) or the bound class 'S' […] with zero or more morphemes of the other bound classes ('Na', several 'T' and 'P', etc.) grouped around each of these. If each of these free classes, and the sequence of bound classes 'S + E', each with or without any of its accompanying bound classes, is not divisible into smaller sections which occur as complete utterances, then each of these constructions satisfies the two conditions for being a minimum utterance of the language.
- Harris (1951), a pag.329

[…] we can say that the minimum utterance of a language is a word construction, and that almost every utterance of the language is a succession of one or more whole word constructions.
- Harris (1951), a pag.332