It may be, then, that the descriptive power of the base component delimits a descriptive fact. With this clarification, the theory of syntactic features developed earlier appears to correlate rather closely with the levels of acceptability from fairly high (eg (99a)) to virtual gibberish (eg (98d)). We have already seen that the speaker-hearer's linguistic intuition suffices to account for an abstract underlying order. Presumably, an important property of these three types of EC does not affect the structure of the system of base rules exclusive of the lexicon. Of course, the natural general principle that will subsume this case is unspecified with respect to irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules.