Expressing and asserting

Consider the following broadly Wittgensteinian line of thought:

1. Sentences like "I love you", "This is scary" and "God is all powerful" express love, fear and awe respectively.
2. Therefore, sentences like "I love you", "This is scary" and "God is all powerful" are not assertions of propositions.

I am happy to grant (1), at least if we qualify the "express" with "typically express". But I think the inference of (2) from (1) is simply a non sequitur, though a tempting one.

Consider this somewhat parallel argument:

3. A birthday cake expresses one's honoring of the years someone has lived.
4. Therefore, a birthday cake is not a piece of food.

It is clear that (4) is a non sequitur. Obviously the right thing to say is not that a birthday cake is not a piece of food, but that a birthday cake is a piece of food that expresses one's honoring of the years someone has lived. By analogy, why shouldn't we say that "I love you", "This is scary" and "God is all powerful" are assertions of propositions which assertions express love, fear and awe respectively? I can express, for instance, love by holding hands, baking a cake or sharing a joke. So why can't I also express love by asserting a relevant proposition, viz., that I have a love for the person? And the same point goes through for the other examples.

In other words, the line of thought (1)-(2) sets up a false dilemma: either these sentences are assertions of a proposition or they are expressions of an attitude. But the natural thing to say is that they are both. It is if anything less surprising that assertions of these very relevant contents should express the attitudes they do than that, say, being on one's knees should express awe or that holding hands should express love.

Taking the sentences in question to be assertions and expressions of the indicated attitudes better fits the data than just taking them to be expressions of the indicated attitudes. For the sentences can be embedded in ways that give purely expressivist accounts great trouble. "If God cannot prevent earthquakes, then God is not all powerful"; "If I love you, then I pursue what I take to be your good"; "Either this is scary or my judgments are completely off."