meaning
the conventional, common or standard sense of an expression, construction or sentence in a given language, or of non-linguistic signal or symbol.
Literal meaning is the non figurative , strict meaning an expression or sentence has in language by virtue of the dictionary meaning of its words and the import of its syntactic construction.
Speakers meaning – what a person intends to communicate by a particular utterance – utterance meaning as Grice calls it.
The literal meaning of a sentence typically does not determine exactly what the speaker says in making a literal utterance. See context.
A sentence ‘s literal meaning also includes its potential for performing certain illocutionary act, in J. L. Austin’s term.
In ethics the distinction has flourished between the expressive or emotive meaning of a word or sentence and its cognitive meaning. The emotive meaning of an utterance or a term is the attitude it expresses, the pejorative meaning of chiseler, say.
Cognitive meaning.
Contemporary analytic philosophy speaks more of propositional attitudes – thoughts, beliefs, intentions – than of ideas and images; and it speaks of the contents of such attitudes: if Jane believes that there are lions in Africa, that belief has its content that there are lions in Africa. Virtually all philosophers agree that propositional attitudes have some crucial connection with meaning.
A fundamental element of a theory of meaning is where it locates the basis of meaning, in thought, in individual speech, or in social practices.
The connotation or sense of a term is its “mode of presentation”, the way it presents its denotation or reference. Terms with the same reference or denotation may present their references differently and so differ in sense of connotation (early morning star).