As we have seen, then, the answer to the question, "What is meaning?", is not immediately obvious.
"Meaning" can be described as the content carried by the words or signs exchanged by people when communicating through language. Arguably, there are two essentially different types of linguistic meaning: conceptual meaning (which refers to the definitions of words themselves, and the features of those definitions, which can be treated using semantic feature analysis) and associative meaning (which refers to the individual mental understandings of the speaker, and which may be connotative, collocative, social, affective, reflected or thematic).
There are several different approaches to explaining what a linguistic "meaning" is:
Idea theories: which claim that meanings are purely mental contents provoked by signs. This approach is mainly associated with the British Empiricist tradition of John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, although interest in it has been renewed by some contemporary theorists under the guise of semantic internalism.
Truth-conditional theories: which hold meaning to be the conditions under which an expression may be true or false. This tradition goes back to Gottlob Frege, although there has also been much modern work in this area.
Use theories: which understand meaning to involve or be related to speech acts and particular utterances, not the expressions themselves. This approach was pioneered by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his Communitarian view of language.
Reference theories (or semantic externalism): which view meaning to be equivalent to those things in the world that are actually connected to signs. Tyler Burge (1946 - ) and Saul Kripke (1940 - ) are the best known proponents of this approach.
Verificationist theories: which associate the meaning of a sentence with its method of verification or falsification. This Verificationist approach was adopted by the Logical Positivists of the early 20th Century.
Pragmatist theories: which maintain that the meaning or understanding of a sentence is determined by the consequences of its application. This approach was favored by C.S. Peirce and other early 20th Century Pragmatists.