But since there is no way of defining the term ‘word’ in such a way as to make the definition tally with the naïve uses of it, contemporary structuralists are prone to employ it most sparingly and to refuse to set up any universally valid linguistic unit between the moneme (often called ‘morpheme’) and the sentence. Formal ‘accidents’ will be ascribed to monemes, not to ‘words’ and dealt with, for instance, as the allomorphs of a given morpheme. They will be taken care of in the course of the analysis of utterance into minimal significant units.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.90