What is meaning?

“Few people start learning a second language for the exotic sounds, or for the elegant sentence structure. Meaning is what we are all after.

We would all like to understand and to be able to convey thoughts and feelings and observations in another language the way we do in our native language.

Ever since Aristotle, linguists have considered language to be the coupling of form (sound or written strings) and meaning. But what do we mean by ‘meaning’? The notion of meaning is actually quite complex…”

In this video, Roumyana Slabakova begins by distinguishing between several types of meanings: lexical, grammatical, semantic, and pragmatic.

How would you explain ‘meaning?’ What does ‘meaning’ mean to you?