The distribution of a unit is the sum total of all its environments. The environment of a unit may be either “right” or “left”.
Three main types of distribution are discriminated: contrastive, non-contrastive and complementary.
The distributional analysis is used to fix and study the units of language in relation to their contextual environments, i. e. adjoining elements in the text. The study is conducted in two stages. At the first stage, the analyzed text is divided into recurrent segments consisting of phonemes. These segments are called “morphs”. At the second stage, the environmental features of the morphs are established and the corresponding identifications are effected.