This article surveys discourse-based approaches to language attitudes in terms of their contributions to grasping socio-indexical meaning creation in metalinguistic discourse. It presents a five-level typology of approaches which covers topic-oriented, linguistic, cognitive, interactional, and rhetorical analyses. The paper debates the ways in which various types of analyses reveal different aspects of social-semiotic and meta-semiotic processes involved in constructions of sociolinguistic indexical relations in the local interactional and larger contextual frames. The article advocates integrated discourse-based approaches and elucidates the potential of a rhetorical approach to serve as a unifying framework for mixing analytical levels.