Semantics is defined as a study of meaning in a language.

But what is meaning? What do we understand by meaning and how meaning can be
communicated?

If we look up in Oxford online dictionary the word meaning is explained as it follows:

1. What is meant by a word, text, concept or an action:

- the meaning of life
2. Implied or explicit significance
- he gave me a look full of meaning
3. Important or worthwhile quality; purpose:
- this can lead to new meaning in the life of older people
4. Intended to communicate something that is not directly expressed:
- she gave Gabriel a meaning look

John I Seed (1977) discuss the problem with the definitions of the words and their exactness.
He sees meaning as knowledge because it only exists in the minds of the native speakers of
that language. He is also making distinction between linguistic knowledge (about the
meaning of words) and encyclopedic knowledge (about the way the world is). Furthermore he
points out the problem with idiolects (individual language) and the problem of ambiguity.
Some words and phrases can be interpreted in different ways.

As we already know meaningful entities can be:

Morpheme
Word
Phrase
Sentence
Paragraph
Discourse
The first thing in communication is the physical side of linguistic utterances which includes
the articulation and perception of speech sounds which is the domain of phonetics.

Phonetics phonology morphology syntax semantics pragmatics

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Sounds meanings

In very general terms speaking consist of communicating information: the speaker has
something in their mind (an idea, object, object, proposal), with the help of the vocal cords
this idea is encoded and emitted to the second person (the hearer) who decodes this sounds
into ideas. The result of this communication is that somehow the hearer knows what the
speaker had in mind. So I would say the very same thing what the speaker and the listener
had in their mind we can call it meaning. If we look deeper in the meaning of certain
information surly we can distinguish between:

a) Speaker meaning
b) Linguistic meaning

For example if we closely examine the following sentences:

The door is over there.

Yes, indeed! It was smashing!
That film was a winner!
Im having the time of my life

We can distinguish two types of meaning: one which is literal we read or hear what has been
implied and the other one is contextual. That means we dont always mean what we say or
write for example in the first sentence the speaker can be angry and wants us to leave or he is
just showing us where the door is. From this we can say that Speaker meaning can be Literal
and Nonliteral. The best way to distinguish this ambiguity is through context .

Furthermore the linguistic meaning can be divided as language meaning and idiolect
meaning. Language meaning can be further divided as dialect meaning which again can be
regional and social.