Communication and Meaning

Perhaps the most primitive occurrence of Communication is a baby crying to its mother out of hunger.  So, the context is fundamentally causal, i. e. the baby cries in an attempt to effect its getting fed.  Now, since a 'sign' is typically correlated with some co-existent that it represents, the rubric mis-characterizes the crying, which seeks something not yet existing.  Instead, 'signal' is the more accurate characterization of the crying, with respect to which the mother feeding the baby is a subsequent 'response'.  Thus, in this example, 1) Communication occurs in a causal context; 2) 'Meaning' in Communication is primarily a relation between a Signal and a Response; and 3) that relation is diachronic.  So, it is only upon further abstraction that a Signal is converted into a Sign, the meaning of which is a contemporaneous object, e. g. the proposition 'The baby is hungry'.