**1. Introduction**

In a communication situation, participants exchange signs and coordinate their overall behavior accordingly. It is, therefore, obvious that there is something that these signs confer, their meaning. But where exactly is this meaning to be found?

The rationalistic approach views meaning-making as a mental process that is based on the link between the individual minds of the participants and a sort of universal mind that contains eternal abstract meanings that correspond to the logical structure of linguistic expressions. This forms the basis of denotational semantics and finds its most developed form in possible world semantics.

On the contrary, embodied approaches regarding meaning are material sedimentation in the neural systems of the communication partners that results from accumulated interactions with a common environment. From this point of view, meanings emerge as orientation fixpoints in structurally coupled cognitive systems and are not pre-existing ideal entities. This offers a semiotic background for neuroscience research that aims to identify the neural signatures of cognitive processes.

Dialogism puts in the center of attention the mutual influence loop in communication acts. With this focus, meaning-making is neither the result of a mental link between individual and universal mind nor of individual activations of material neural sedimentations, but of an existential tension field between communication participants.
