This applied semiotics intends to show that the richness and complexity of Charles S. Peirce need not be lost through an empirical application to psycholinguistics, but instead enables the latter to make better informed hypothesis testing. It is proposed that Peircean semiotics can be used to ground a taxonomy of linguistic representations of the self in English, which is parsed not on the basis of semantics, but rather according to the triadic structure of the self as formulated by Peirce. This taxonomy was implemented by a language analysis computer program, SSWC (Sundararajan-Schubert Word Count), and applied to an analysis of language use in emotionally expressive writings. Results of two studies are reported to demonstrate the heuristic value of this applied approach to semiotics.