Why "Can you open the window?" is not really a question
Taken literally, a teacher asking whether you can open the window is enquiring about your arm strength. Everyone hears a request instead. That gap between what a sentence says and what a speaker means is one of the puzzles philosophers of meaning have chased since ancient Greece, India and China.
Philosophers usually describe meaning as a relation: the word dog is linked to a four-legged animal, a map to terrain, a footprint to whoever left it. One word can carry several meanings, as bank does for a lender and a riverside, while two different words, such as film and movie, can share one. The English noun meaning is itself old, with an early appearance in the Wycliffite Bible around 1384, built on an Old English verb for intending or making known.
Language gets most attention because it is the richest and most general sign system. Its study is often split three ways. Word meaning covers items like sleep or bird, whose sense cannot be assembled from their letters. Sentence meaning is compositional: the parts and the way they are combined fix the whole, which is why a statement, a question and a command about a closed window differ. Utterance meaning adds context, turning an apparent enquiry into a polite instruction.
Further distinctions pile up. Descriptive meaning states facts that can be true or false, whereas emotive meaning vents or stirs feelings; yelping in pain after stepping on glass is not a report. Dad and father point to the same person yet feel different. The split matters in ethics, where cognitivists hold that moral claims can be true or false and emotivists see them as expressions of approval or disapproval. Speaker meaning can also drift from dictionary convention, and irony, such as praising a disaster as a great job, relies on everyone recognising the literal sense is not intended.
Competing theories try to explain it all. Reference theories say meaning is what an expression stands for; truth-conditional theories say grasping a claim means knowing the circumstances that would make it correct; mind-based theories point to ideas and intentions; use-based theories look at how speakers actually employ words. The debate feeds into logic, semiotics, aesthetics and philosophy of mind.
Source: Meaning (philosophy)
