4.6—
The Relationship of the Marker, Signifier, and Counter Levels
Since marker types are independent of the syntactic and semantic properties that their tokens can take on in different symbol games, while counter and signifier types presuppose the existence of marker types, there is a hierarchic relationship between the marker level and the signifier and counter levels. Analyzing a complex of sounds or squiggles as counters presupposes dividing them into markers, and so both the counter and signifier levels are dependent upon the marker level.
There is not, however, any absolute dependence between the counter and signifier levels. One can, for example, assign interpretations to marker types without situating them within a syntactically structured symbol game, and one can concoct "purely formal systems" for which there is no interpretation scheme. This does not mean, however, that syntax and semantics are absolutely independent, either. The semantic values of some marker complexes, such as sentences, are dependent upon the syntactic structure of the complexes as well as the interpretations of the signifying terms. Such structures are subject to compositional analysis . But there is no absolute dependence of either the counter or the signifier level upon the other in the way that both are dependent upon the marker level.
The marker level is similarly related to lower levels of analysis. An entity's ability to count as a marker, after all, depends not only upon conventions but upon the fact that it bears a physically instantiated pattern satisfying the criterion for its type. One might see such patterns as abstract physical features that are literally present in objects, and one might thus speak of a "pattern level" which is connected to the marker level above it by marker conventions and to other physical descriptions below it by various kinds of abstraction. These abstractions bracket those features of an object that are not relevant to its having a pattern, rendering it suitable to count as a token of a marker type. We might represent the resulting structure of levels of analysis graphically as in Figure 5, with the nodes representing the objects appearing at a level and the arrows
Figure 5
between nodes representing what relates the objects appearing at one level to those appearing at the next.
Now it is important to note that the sortal terms 'marker', 'signifier', and 'counter' designate conventional rather than natural kinds, and that they can pick out the same objects under different aspects. Indeed, any object that is a signifier or a counter must also be a marker, and objects that are markers may very well be signifiers and counters as well. The need for the sortal terms arises not because there are three mutually exclusive classes of particulars, but because there are different sorts of questions about symbols that call for classifications based on different features. (There are, for example, questions about orthography, syntax, and semantics.) The distinction between markers, signifiers, and counters is also useful for discussing certain aspects of language, such as ambiguity, homonymy, homophony, and certain kinds of performance errors. One kind of ambiguity occurs, for example, when one has marker strings that admit of multiple semantic interpretations. Homonymy occurs when a single graphemic marker string is associated by different signifier conventions with two or more meanings. Homophony occurs when a single auditory marker string is associated with multiple meanings. Performance errors such as slips of the tongue, malapropisms, and spoonerisms are ways of producing a marker token that is not compatible with the semantic interpretation that one intended one's utterance to have.
The different sortal terms also license different kinds of inferences about the objects they pick out. From the fact that an object is a counter in some language game, it follows that it is a marker and that it has syntactic properties. Nothing follows, however, about whether it has semantic properties. Similarly, if an object is a signifier, it follows that it is a marker and that it has semantic properties; but nothing follows about whether it is used in a syntactically structured symbol game. And from the fact that an object is a marker, nothing follows about whether it has either syntactic or semantic properties.