Summarizing his life-long engagement with the field of semiotics and extending this with cognitive science and phenomenology into the transdisciplinary science of cognitive semiotics, the author asks key questions like: What is meaning in general and sign use in particular? What is specific about the picture sign? What is communication? The book is divided into three parts, followed by an extensive case study on visual rhetoric. Edited posthumously by his closest colleagues, the book sediments the legacy of Göran Sonesson as one of the leading semioticians of our times. It is bound to become a classic in the fields dedicated to the pursuit of meaning.