What Do Things Mean?

Meaning is about the connection or relation between one thing and another.
While everything can be considered connected to everything else in some way, asking about the meaning of something is implicitly an inquiry about the connections that are most relevant, important, or noteworthy (the top few items of an aggregation).
What someone means by a communication is about the intended (hoped for) connection between signs (such as words) and other things.
Similar to means-ends chains, there are generally meaning chains between two different things, and the whole chain connects the two.
See also: how things happen, and name calling.