The smartarse-rhetoric doesn't really work: unless you have rhetorical goals which are so far off what one might assume this genre to be supporting that no one would guess them; that would only be for you to judge.
I find that amidst the fluff and the noise and the alliteration and the abuse, there are sometimes points in your emails that raise issues that would be worthwhile thought about. As I often say to folks, I don't do interpersonals, so that is why perhaps your messages come through. The rest I interpret neither as personal, nor relevant, nor useful; just noise.
As Ed sets out, though, your take on 'meaning' made zero sense to me …
(… for the story which generalizes beyond the statements of Saussure and Hjelmslev, we can consider Peirce also as a starting point). None of these positions gets hung up on some referential semantics; the *meaning* of the child's 'up', is that the child gets picked up and that everyone is happy about the result (or not). There is considerable work describing how contexts and intendedly communicative acts within those contexts are interdependent; there are even pretty powerful frameworks that show how this works...
Blogger Comments:
Appraised
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Appraisal
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Polarity
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Attitude
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John Bateman
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positive
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judgement: propriety
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John Bateman
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positive
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judgement: capacity
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Note that the second instance is invoking judgement of the author, and since no specific references are provided, its function is to bully the interlocutor (look how much more I know than you, so don't bother trying to argue!).