For the purpose of descriptive linguistic investigations a single LANGUAGE or dialect is considered over a brief period of time. This comprises the talk which takes place in a language community, i.e. among a group of speakers, each of whom speaks the language as a native, and may be considered an informant from the point of view of the linguist. None of the terms used here can be rigorously defined.
- Harris (1951), Pag. 13

Languages differ, of course, in the degree of correlation between minimum-utterance construction and substitution class sequence. In Arabic, single-word sentences have sequences identical with those of sentences of several words; 'ktbtu' and 'ana ktbt lih' both mean ‘I wrote him’ ('N⁵ V² N⁴'). In English this is rare. When an English minimum utterance occurs as a whole utterance it usually does not have a sequence structure comparable to that of longer utterances. We have one-word sentences like This. ('N'), 'Going?' ('A'), 'No!' ('Indep.'), as compared with several-word utterances like 'We need some rain.' ('NVN'). Such differences between minimum-utterance and long-utterance constructions give different utterance-status to the various morpheme classes of the language […]. (p.330, n.9)
- Harris (1951), Pag. 330, n.9