The research methods are arranged here in the form of the successive procedures of analysis imposed by the working linguist upon his data. […] Starting with the utterances which occur in a single language community at a single time, these procedures determine what be regarded as identical in various parts of various utterances,and provide a method for identifying all the utterances as relatively few stated arrangements of relatively few stated elements.
- Harris (1951), a pag.1

These procedures are not a plan for obtaining data or field work. In using them, it does not matter if the linguist obtains the data by taking texts, questioning an informant, or recording a conversation. Even where the procedures call for a particular contact with the informant, as in obtaining repetitions of an utterance, it does not matter how this is carried out: e.g. the linguist can interrupt a onversation to ask the speaker or hearer to repeat an utterance that has occurred, and may then alter the conversation so as to get its recurrence in different environments.
- Harris (1951), a pag.1

These procedures also do not constitute a necessary laboratory schedule in the sense that each procedures should be completed before the next is entered upon.
- Harris (1951), a pag.1

The use of these procedures is merely to make explicit what choices each linguist makes, so that if two analysts come out with different phoneme list for a given language we should have exact statements of what positional variants were assigned by each to what phonemes and wherein lay their differences of assignement.
- Harris (1951), a pag.2

Examples of cumbersome but explicit procedures offered here in place of the simpler intuitive practice are: the stress upon distribution rather than meaning in setting up morphemes; and the deferring of morphophonemics until after the morpheme alternants have been fully stated.
- Harris (1951), a pag.3

The procedures given below, however, are merely ways of arranging the original data; and since they go only by formal distinctions there is no opportunity for uncontrolled interpreting of the data or for forcing of the meaning.
- Harris (1951), a pag.3

The whole schedule of procedures outlined in the following chapters, which is designed to begin with the raw data of speech and end with a statement of grammatical structure, is essentially a twice-made application of two major steps: the setting up of elements, and the statement of the distribution of these elements relative to each other.
- Harris (1951), a pag.6