In social semiotics, evaluative meaning arises as an important special case of the Orientational semiotic function. And finally, we must also always construct our meanings in such a way that each meaningful whole, on each of many levels and scales, is organized by relations among its constituents parts, be they structural units or cohesive threads of semantic continuity. These seven semantic categories or Evaluative Dimensions appear to cover all the possible kinds of evaluations which can be made in English and related languages with regard to states or affairs or propositions and proposals. There are other evaluative categories for persons, things, actions, and phenomena, though the latter two overlap substantially with the seven just listed. These seven are mutually independent of one another in principle, though often conflated in practice and in the connotations of particular words in the lexicon.
Evaluative meaning plays a special role in social semiotics.
It provides the link between belief and action, i.e. between semiotic representations or meanings and the material processes by which we participate in our local ecosystem. Consistency of evaluative stances also defines and links different discourse formations intertextually, so that we interpret the evaluative force of words in one text in relation to expectations deriving from the evaluative stance of related texts. In simple drawings, we must often rely on intertextual information, i.e. on presumptions of consistency with other visual representations, often accompanied by more explicit verbal evaluations. We will see this in the case of political cartoons. I believe that all semiosis is necessarily multimodal semiosis.