The Complexities of Meaning The Meaning of Meaning Formally speaking, meaning and the study of words are bound together with the formal and broader discipline of semantics.3 Semantics is the study of “signification” or “meaning.” It can offer to the interpreter many insights regarding the issue of method. The goal of this discipline at the lexical level is to examine how meaning is communicated through words. In semantics one of the problems of lexical meaning is, in fact, determining what one means