Collocations are actual words in habitual company. A word in a usual collocation stares you in the face just as it is. Colligations cannot be of word… - John Rupert Firth

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.

Strictly speaking, the grammatical method of resolving a sentence into parts is nothing but a fanciful procedure ; but it is the real fountain of all knowledge, since it led to the invention of writing.

There is always the danger that the use of traditional grammatical terms with reference to a wide variety of languages may be taken to imply a secret belief in universal grammar. Every analysis of a particular ‘language’ must of necessity determine the values of the ad hoc categories to which traditional names are given. What is here being sketched is a general linguistic theory applicable to particular linguistic descriptions, not a theory of universals for general linguistic description.