“It is not easy to determine what are the units of speech. Some would say speech sounds, others phonemes… The general opinion is, however, that words, not phones or phonemes or phoneme systems, are the units of speech.”

—  John Rupert Firth

Source: Speech, 1930, p. 182-183; As cited in: Angela Senis (2016: 293)

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John Rupert Firth 14
English linguist 1890–1960

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