In the philosophy of language and metaphysics, metasemantics is the study of the foundations of natural language semantics (the philosophical study of meaning). Metasemantics searches for "the proper understanding of compositionality, the object of truth-conditional analysis, metaphysics of reference, as well as, and most importantly, the scope of semantic theory itself" and asks "how it is that expressions become endowed with their semantic significance".

While semantics is that part of linguistics that studies the meaning of words (lexical semantics), of the sets of words, of phrases (phrasal semantics), and of texts, metasemantics, in the sense given by the Maraini, goes beyond the meaning of words and consists of the use, within the text, of words without meaning, but having a familiar sound to the language to which the text itself belongs, and which must still follow the syntactical and grammatical rules (in the case of Fosco …