STATE TRANSITION SEMANTICS

State Transition Semantics (STS) is a semantics for natural language that construes natural language meanings in terms of states and state transitions of a language user. We illustrate STS by an English fragment from the context of elementary arithmetical instruction. Instructions arising typically in such context are Look at the top! Look at the top number! Look at the next number down! Look down until you see a bar! Add the numbers! Remember the number! Write the ones digit of the number! Write the tens digit of the number in the column to the left! etc. Notice that any execution or interpretation of these instructions strongly relies on a perceptual environment with objects that fit the description of being a number, of being arranged in a row or column. Instructions like these have been used in Maas and Suppes (1984, 1985) in teaching experiments of an arithmetical robot. STS, however, is not meant to be limited to the robotic context but rather to serve as a model for natural language understanding in a general perspective.