Music semiotics is a branch of music theory that has been particularly developing since the 1960s. As semiotics moved from general linguistics, structuralism and theory of communication to cognitive and psychological linguistics, as sources of understanding music cognition – that is, as it moved from “hard” to “soft” semiotics as Agawu calls them (1999: 154) – its vocabulary became strongly metaphoric and complex. At the same time, there was no strict convention concerning the usage of the vocabulary in question. In this paper, I will focus on some important interrelated issues of music semiotics vocabulary, such as the concept of meaning, and all rhetorical variations regarding this term in music. Special attention will be given to explana...