According to the chapter, there are three dimensions or levels of meaning: the first being the meaning of a word, of an utterance, and of a text. The first dimension is the word which is the literal meaning of the word. The second dimension addresses the possible meanings of words that contribute to the meaning of an utterance, which is an act by the speaker. The third dimension is text, something the author has constructed, and its meaning is not a proposition but what it does, its potential to affect readers. It is important to look at the whole picture while reading a text, not just the literal language that the author used, the same literal language in the different pictures may present a totally different meaning. I was interested in how language can be a system of differences, his theory of language states that “what makes each element of a language what it is, and what gives it its identity, are the contrasts between it and other elements within the system of the language” (58). Since language is a system of signs and the key facts, Saussure calls this “arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign”, which means the sign is a combination of a form and a meaning, and the relation between form and meaning is based on convention, not natural resemblance. Each language is a system of concepts as well as forms: a system of conventional signs that organize the world. Meaning is the experience of a subject and a property of a text; what we understand and what we try to understand.

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