The word meaning is an element of colloquial language and, as such, is multiply polysemous. In linguistics, different kinds of meaning are distinguished. They need different and well-defined terms. Here a distinction will be drawn between the significatum and the sense. Both are meanings of an expression used in an utterance in human communication. is such an expression.

A hearer who receives as a message and possesses the knowledge of a member of the speech community of American English understands that the speaker encourages him to tell him an aforementioned story. Call this the sense of . It might also be called the message content. The question of how the hearer arrives at this understanding is partly a psycholinguistic question which may be left alone here. The purely linguistic approach to this problem distinguishes to phases in the construction of meaning:

In the first phase of the interpretation of a linguistic expression, the linguist constructs that meaning which the elements and the rules of the language system render possible. For , this is something like the following:

P1: There is a story S in the universe of discourse.
P2: You do not tell / are not telling me S.
There is some reason R for P2.
The referent for R is not known.
I hand the turn over to you with the expectation that you take up at the point where I left of.

This is the meaning that the system of the language allows the linguist to construct.¹. It could be called the system meaning of an expression. It is what has been called significatum (French signifé) since Saussure 1916. To repeat, this is the meaning that one arrives at by applying the rules of the English language system, including the semantic subsystem, to the expression units and their combination.

In the second phase of the interpretation of such an expression, the linguist applies more rules, principles and conventions of the speech community which do not belong to the language system. This speech community has a discourse convention which is roughly as follows:

Assume a significatum (of the kind explicated for ) where the speaker indicates that he does not know the reason R why the hearer does not do P2. Take this as a rhetorical question. Then the speaker (is not asking you to name R; instead, he) is implying that there is no such R. Given this, by implicature he is asking you to do P2.

This is what may be called the sense of an utterance. It could also be called the discourse meaning. The consequence of this distinction for linguistic methodology is the following: Signs as elements of a language system have a significatum. For purposes of analyzing the grammatical structure of an expression, one works with the significatum. In order to understand the sense of a message, this does not suffice. Instead, one applies a set of conventions outside the language system to construct it.

¹ Some properties of the preceding informal semantic representation may be less than obvious. For instance, is an interrogative sentence which is generally assumed to code a question. The above is a somewhat differentiated approach to such constructions.