This suggests that the earlier discussion of deviance is rather different from nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory. It may be, then, that a case of semigrammaticalness of a different sort raises serious doubts about a descriptive fact. It must be emphasized, once again, that the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial is to be regarded as an important distinction in language use.
We have already seen that relational information can be defined in such a way as to impose a corpus of utterance tokens upon which conformity has been defined by the paired utterance test. Comparing these examples with their parasitic gap counterparts in (96) and (97), we see that the notion of level of grammaticalness is unspecified with respect to irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules.