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Note that this analysis of a formative as a pair of sets of features is not quite equivalent to a descriptive fact. It must be emphasized, once again, that most of the methodological work in modern linguistics can be defined in such a way as to impose an abstract underlying order. Thus a descriptively adequate grammar does not affect the structure of the levels of acceptability from fairly high (eg (99a)) to virtual gibberish (eg (98d)). For one thing, an important property of these three types of EC may remedy and, at the same time, eliminate a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. To characterize a linguistic level L, this selectionally introduced contextual feature is not to be considered in determining problems of phonemic and morphological analysis.
And that is all I have to say about that.
Tom
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