I will be concerned here with an important distinction of sign-type which has yet to be used effectively in applied semiotic, as far as I know: the Peircean distinction between a rheme, a dicent, and an argument (in a generalized sense of this word). The kind of application this distinction has is clearest to me in the case of the critical analysis of artistic texts (verbal, visual, acoustical, or whatever), particularly literary texts, so I will focus upon this sort of application here, though with hope that the reader can derive from what I say an intuitive sense for its more general import and use.