It is interesting that when I think of two and three phases I think of that silly sinusoidal picture of sine waves superimposed. How are you supposed to know what the voltage is actually doing. Does it add? Does it subtract? A total conspiracy.
Here's something that comes to mind. Whenever you have two signal coming together, the voltage of the resulting signal at any given time will be somewhere in between the two signal values. If one signal goes to +5v and the other goes to -2v, the result will be somewhere in between depending on the resistors the signals are fed through. If you can remember superposition theory then you know what I am talking about.