But the conventional nature of rhyme and metre, their essential arbitrariness, points to the fact that they themselves are also signifiers, albeit paralexical and to some extent parasyntactic. Andrew Taylor (1987) Reading Australian Poetry, p. 74.

Applied to a human being this would for instance mean that to say that someone is influenced by someone else, only refers to the fact that the last person is acting as a triggerer of structural change with regard to the first one, but that the triggerer isn't sure that he can be a triggerer, nor what will be the result of being the triggerer.

a confirmed opium-smoker

I brodericked him when he was alive, Johnny would say, but it is against my religion to do anything like that to the dead. [spit in corpse's eye]