Semantics is the study of meaning.

It focuses on the relation between signifiers, like

words, phrases, signs, and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotation
Meaning is the idea or concept which can be transferred from the mind of speaker to the
mind of hearer with the help of linguisticc symbols.
Concept is the mental image, the abstract image which belongs to our thinking.A word is
used to lable the concept and acts as a symbol for it.The concept is referred to referent
which refers to whatever is denoted by linguistic symbols.Sense and reference are the
two different aspects of term meaning
According to Palmer the term reference deals with the relationship between the linguistic
elements, words, sentences, etc., and the non-linguistic world of experience.In linguistics,
a sense is one of the meanings of a word.
Word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic
content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the
smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of
a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks,
redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on
its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed). A
complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness,
quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board,
rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases
(a red rock), sentence (I threw a rock).
Word in a language can be divided into (a) content or notional words (b)
functional words

Content words are words such as nouns, most verbs, adjectives, and adverbs that refer to
some object, action, or characteristic while function words function primarily to express
the grammatical relationships between other words in a sentence.A content word has two
kinds of meaning: Lexical meaning and grammatical meaning.
The lexical meaning of a word is the sense that a speaker attaches to a linguistic element
as a symbol of actual object. It may cover both denotative as well as conceptual or
cognitive and associated meanings..The denotative meaning is the basic or conceptual
meaning and it is the central factor in linguistic communication.The associated meaning
of a word may b sub-divided into connotative meaning, social or stylistic meaning,
affective meaning, collective meaning and thematic meaning.
Lexical Semantics
The branch of semantics which deals with the word meaning.It examines
relationships among word meanings.Following are some of the relation: