A semantics “ outside language ” : Operational Semantics A new

In this article, the author briefly introduces a new theory in Semantics, Operational Semantics (OS). OS deals with the meanings of all the basic linguistic elements that are indispensable for any linguistic expression, that is, mainly all the “grammatical” words (conjunctions, prepositions, articles, most pronouns and corresponding adjectives, fundamental verbs like “to be”, “to have” etc, the main adverbs) and, in the large number of languages that have a more or less rich morphology, almost all morphemes (the ones which indicate cases, in languages that have cases, the number and gender of nouns and adjectives, moods and tenses of verbs etc). The fundamental presupposition of OS is that the meanings of such linguistic elements are essentially sequences of elemental mental operations, amongst which the ones of attention play a key role. The author proposes a list of these elemental mental operations and shows how it is possible, by basing ourselves on these, to identify the meanings of the aforesaid linguistic elements. A new linguistic theory, dealing with the “deep” structure of language, derives from this. This theory also allows us to define the fundamental concepts of Linguistics (such as “noun”, “subject”, “object” etc) in a simple and clear way, propose new solutions for some other problems in Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, and open new research perspectives. In the last part of the article, the author also mentions a possible short-term practical application of OS, i.e. a device to improve the quality of machine translation, and highlights the limits of OS.