The semiotic ideology of the Enlightenment project focused a suspicious, indeed somewhat negative intuitive regard on how language essentially mediates the majority of interpersonal human phenomena, in the Western tradition those mediations having long since been subsumed under the rubric of rhetoric. Immanent in and essential to language as the central sociocultural semiotic is, its peculiar character is as a dialectical socio-semiotic phenomenon in which denotation, to be sure, plays several roles. Language manifests a tension between what is encompassed in a denotational model so central to the intuitions of both laypersons and professional students of language in the West, and discourse as practice in a sociologically or socioculturally informed perspective. These two functionalities engage reciprocally through several planes of metapragmatic reflexivity. This tension can be displayed and examined by developing a (meta-) semiotic from generally Peircean principles.