This paper aims to distinguish various kinds of meaning types, to point out several problems on the current usage in Korean linguistics, and to propose a desirable way of using these terminologies. Referential meaning and conceptual meaning are two aspects of signifié of language as a sign, semantic meaning and pragmatic meaning are concepts related to the level of meaning production. Basic meaning and extended meaning are distinctions of ‘senses’ that polysemic words can have. Descriptive meaning, expressive meaning and social meaning are the distinctions for ‘semantic components’. I propose that by clarifying these differences, semantic description of grammatical forms can be made more efficient. Even though efforts to find ‘core meaning’ in semantic description of the grammatical forms continued, the relationship between core meaning and secondary meaning has not been clearly presented. Furthermore, I believe that there is more room for debate whether finding this ‘core meaning’ is a necessary task in all the semantic description of grammatical forms.
