The Gesamtbedeutung of a language's past tense, for instance, might be conceived as "distance from the present".
In Japanese, for example, the tense system has been reduced to a system of "past", "non-past", and "probable", where the latter two tenses share the Gesamtbedeutung of abstraction from the real.
The probable tense functions in much the same way as the non-past, but with a stronger sense of separation from the present reality.
For another example, the English word endings "-ing" and "-er" share a Gesamtbedeutung of agency (as opposed to that of patienthood, represented by such morphemes as "-ed" and "-ee").
Though differing in grammatical function, these two morphemes share a common Gesamtbedeutung.