The fundamental difference between distinctive and significant units must ultimately account for one very important discrepancy in the syntactic comportment of phonemes and monemes: a phoneme fulfils a function in a definite position. If we want to identify a 'signifiant', e.g that of the word 'lake', it is not enough to say that it is made up of three phonemes /l/, /e'/, and /k/ because the same phonemes are those which characterize the words 'clay' and 'kale'; one must specify: /l/, /e'/, and /k/ in that order. In other words, when pronouncing 'lake', speakers have to choose, in initial position, /l/ and oppose any inclination to say /k/ for 'cake', /t/ for 'take', &c. Postponing /l/ till the end of the word and anticipating the choice of the /k/ would not do, because we would thus get 'kale' which is not what we mean. All this, which sounds trivial, is, in fact, basic for the establishment of the phonematic pattern of the language. The situation is different with monemes or significant elements generally: the relevancy of the order is far from general: it is fairly immaterial whether I say 'the one I like is Paul' or 'Paul is the one I like'; the implications are different if I say 'with Paul, I went to Rome' and 'I went to Rome with Paul', but they do not affect the identification of the moneme group 'with Paul', and the same applies to 'yesterday' in 'I went…yesterday' and 'yesterday , I went…'. Certainly, the respective position of monemes is often determined by tradition or by the need to distinguish the utterances with different meanings: it just isn’t done to say 'Paul with went I Rome to', and it is far from immaterial whether I speak of 'root hair' or 'hair root', not to speak, of course the difference between 'the man kills the bear' and 'the bear kills the man'. But it is clear that, whereas phoneme classes can be established by listing all the phonemes that appears in a given context, this cannot be done indiscriminately with monemes, and it might be seem that the first step with them should be to determine the situations where their presence results from an exclusive choice, as is normal with phonemes.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.40-41