Check out Clare Painter’s work on interpersonal lg development, from a discourse semantic perspective
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This is misleading. To be clear, in the above cited paper, Clare Painter applies the notion of AFFECT to human protolanguage. The fact that this is possible demonstrates that such a system is not even restricted to language, let alone discourse semantics. The semantics of human language is but one manifestation of a basic distinction that precedes and transcends language: inclination (attraction) vs disinclination (aversion).
Most fundamentally, this distinction is a feature of perceptual semiotic systems. On Edelman's model of brain function, the Theory of Neuronal Group Selection, the experience of an animal is perceptually categorised on the basis of inherited values that have proved adaptive to its ancestors, such as the positive or negative value of the perception of a light source. So, depending on the inherited value, an animal will be inclined to ("like") or disinclined to ("dislike") a perceived light source, and its (non-semiotic) behaviour accordingly satisfies the specific value in its perceptual system.
Further, the like/dislike distinction is manifested in non-semiotic social systems — on Halliday's linear taxonomy of systems (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999: 507-9) — such as those of eusocial insects: bees, ants and termites. In such cases, the context-specific exchange of (perceptual) like vs dislike values, via pheromones, is a means of co-ordinating behaviour, and so is a means of social organisation.
Furthermore, the like/dislike distinction is manifested in social semiotic systems, such as the protolanguage of social semiotic species, including humans, in giving positive or negative value to the symbols being exchanged.
The like/dislike distinction in human language, then, is just the latest manifestation of a more general phenomenon. Its application to human protolanguage, therefore, is not taking a specifically discourse semantic perspective.
