  The central semantic notion for medieval authors was that of signification, which must not be identified with the notion of meaning for two reasons. First, the meaning of a term is not an entity to which the term is related in some way, but one can say that an utterance signifies or makes known an entity, whether conceptual or real, universal or particular. Moreover, meaning is not transitive, but signification is. A spoken word was said to be a conventional sign of a concept, which in turn, at least for later authors, was a natural sign of a thing, and so spoken words were said to be at least indirect signs of things. This is not to deny that medieval thinkers had a general notion of meaning. They did talk about sense (sensus), about the thought or content (sententia) of a phrase, and about the force of a word (vis verbi), and they often used the word ‘significatio’ itself along with its cognates quite widely.  When they were discussing indexicals, especially personal pronouns and demonstratives, they drew a distinction between a term’s general signification or what Kaplan has called ‘character’ and its particular signification, that is, its ‘content’ or contribution to what is actually said on a particular occasion of use.