The universe of discourse for each statement in the descriptive analyisis is a single whole utterance in the language in question. […] most of the data consists (by definition) of whole utterances, including longer stretches which can be described as sequences of whole utterances […]. The utterances with which the linguist works will often come in longer discourses, involving one speaker (as in texts taken from an informant) or more than one (as in conversations).
- Harris (1951), a pag.11

[…] any longer discourse is describable as a succession of utterance, i.e. a succession of elements having the stated interrelations.
- Harris (1951), a pag.12

An utterance is any stretch of talk, by one person, before and after which there is silence on the part of the person. The utterance is, in general, not identical with the ‘sentence’ (as that word is commonly used), since a great many utterances, in English for example, consist of single words, phrases, ‘incomplete sentences’, etc.
- Harris (1951), a pag.14

[…] every utterance can be completely identified as a complex of phonemic elements, and every utterance can be completely identified as a complex of morphemic elements.
- Harris (1951), a pag.21

Utterances are stretches of continuous events. If we trace them as physiological events, we find various parts of the body moving in some degree independently of each other and continuously […]. If we trace utterances as acoustic events, we find continuous changes of sound-wave periodicities: there may be various stretches during each of which the wave crests are similar to one another, but the passage from one such stretch to a second will in general be gradual.
- Harris (1951), a pag.25

[…] we have to show that relative to what we are now investigating (namely, segmentation) each utterance has the same structure as the whole language (i.e. as the totality of all utterances in all situations).
- Harris (1951), a pag.27

For our present purposes of representing speech by segments (arbitrary at first but later to be adjusted to phonemic length), any utterance, no matter how brief, is equally serviceable as a sample of speech.
- Harris (1951), a pag.28

As long as every utterance is composed of unique segments, it cannot be compared with other utterances, and our linguistic analysis cannot make headway.
- Harris (1951), a pag.29

Equivalent utterances are then defined as being equivalent in all their segments; distinct utterances are non-equivalent in at least one of their segments.
- Harris (1951), a pag.34

If each utterance were considered by itself, it might be represented as a continuum or as a simultaneity of features which change with time […].
- Harris (1951), a pag.34

If we take two utterances which are distinguished from each other only by the presence of an intermittent segment in one which is lacking in the other, they will be equivalent to each other in some of their repetitions and not in others.
- Harris (1951), a pag.40

We want to be able to say that two different utterances are equivalent throughout their duration in some one of their utterance-long features, whether or not they are similar in any of their successive segments.
- Harris (1951), a pag.45

[…] the utterance consists of two simultaneous section: first, a suprasegmental component which extends over the length of the utterance, and represents the fixed sequence of grades of the feature in question, e.g. the tone sequence '01123'. Second, a sequence of segmental remnants identical with the original segments except for the extraction of the feature in question, e.g. the pitchless remainders [iz ðæt Ə bayt ].
- Harris (1951), a pag.49

[…] almost all utterance, intonations, etc. stop not in the middle but at the end of a morpheme.
- Harris (1951), a pag.88

Utterances are occasionally distinguished from one another by contours of tone alone.
- Harris (1951), a pag.121

[…] every utterance consists of some non-contour elements and some contour elements […].
- Harris (1951), a pag.150

Each particular utterance cannot have more morphemic segments than the criterion of tentative independence permits.
- Harris (1951), a pag.159, n.7

We may find a short utterance with one short contour over it ('I’m not coming.'), a longer utterance with the same short contour given twice over it ('I’m not coming. It’s too late'), a longer utterance yet with the same contour three times over it, and so on.
- Harris (1951), a pag.170, n.32

[…] we may still find between utterances which are identical in their morphemic segments, differences in form that correlate regularly with differences in environment and meaning: 'The man has just killed a bull' is not substitutable in longer contexts and in social situations for 'A bull has just killed the man'. In the same way 'You saw Fred?' differs from 'Fred saw you?'.
- Harris (1951), a pag.184

[…] instead of identifying an utterance as an ordered set (a particular permutation) of particular morphemic segments, we would identify it as a set (a combination) of particular morphemic elements. If the segments in question have contrasting arrangements, one of these elements will consist not of adding some phonemes to the utterance, but of adding arrangement among the sets of phonemes. In that case, we may say that the arrangement is morphemic. If the segments have restricted order, the utterance will contain no morphemic element of order, but when the relation among these segments is stated […] these particular segments will be defined as having a particular automatic order among them. If the segments in question have various descriptively orders, no morphemic element of order is required in identifying the utterance, nor is any statement about order involved in the definition of the segments. If we do this, every formal difference between utterances that correlates with differences in contextual environment and in social situation would have been assigned to some morphemic element or other.
- Harris (1951), a pag.185

[…] certain utterances may be characteristics of the speech of young children in a given language community. If we wish to know what the probability is that some utterance will be of this type, we need but discover the ratio of children’s utterances to adults’utterances.
- Harris (1951), a pag.186

The impracticality of obtaining an adequate corpus is increased by the fact that some utterances are rare not merely because of the great number of possible morphemically different utterances, but also because of a special rarity which we may call a culturally determined limitation.
- Harris (1951), a pag.253

Any two utterances which are not descriptively equivalent differ from each other in morphemic content. This difference can be readily recognized in terms of the morpheme index. Some utterances, however, also differ in a less easily recognizable respect: e.g. when a morpheme or sequence in one utterance is a member of a different class than when the same morpheme or sequence occurs in the other utterance.
- Harris (1951), a pag.271

Utterances or parts of them are considered equivalent to each other if they are repetitions of each other; they are distinct from each other if they are esplicitly not repetitions […].
- Harris (1951), a pag.361

Utterances and parts of utterances which do not occur in the same environment cannot be directly tested in order to see if they are or are not repetitions of each other […]. Even where the test is possible we may have an ambiguous result, in the case of features which appear in some repetitions of an utterance and not in others […].
- Harris (1951), a pag.361, n.1