System of signs

2) psycholinguistic approach. It was developed by Sapir, Выготский and Saussure.
2.1 Sapir: He spoke about the link between thinking and speaking. The meaning of the word presents such a close amalgam of thought and language, that it is hard to say whether it is a phenomenon of speech or a phenomenon of thought. Thought is not just expressed in words, it comes into existence through them.
2.2 Saussure used the analogy of a sheet of paper whose two sides are parts of one whole. One side is thought and the other side is sound. In a language we can neither divide sound from thought, not thought from sound. Linguistics operates on the border line where the elements of thoughts and sounds combine.
3) referential approach. The characteristic of this approach is that It distinguishes between the three components closely connected with meaning: the sound form of the linguistic sign, the concept and the referent. The referent is the object of reality to which the linguistic sign refers.
Semiotic triangle:

We are able to use words in speech only when this triangle is formed in our mind.
One of the lines is dotted because there is no direct link between the word and its referent.
This links is only establish meaning.
According to this point of view, the meaning is a correlation between a sound form of a word, the underlying concept and the object it denotes. Meaning is not identical with any of the points of the triangle, but is closely connected with them.

The structure of lexical meaning.

Denotational component. The word “denotational” is formed from the word denote – to state as a name for smth. Denotational meaning is a kind of meaning when a word serves as a name for an object of extralinguistic reality. The word is used in its significative meaning when it serves a name for a class of objects and denotes a general idea of an object. F.e.: East or West home is best; A good laugh is sunshine in the house. The word is used in its demonstrative meaning when it serves to name individual elements of reality. F.e.: She studied to make their home a nice place.