We see therefore that although the range of phonetic similarity of various occurrences of a phoneme is important, it is the criterion of distribution that determines whether a given sound is to be classified in one phoneme or another. And when, having fixed the phonemes, we come to compare them, we can do so only on the basis of the distributional criterion in terms of which they had been defined. As in any classificatory scheme, the distributional analysis is simply the unfolding of the criterion used for the original classification. If it yields a patterned arrangement of the phonemes, that is an interesting result for linguistic structure.
- Harris (1941), Pag. 348