Programming language semantics as in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantics_(programming_languag... is usually decoupled from space complexity. An interpreter or emulator is considered to preserve language semantics even if it changes time or space complexity.
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We're talking about the same thing. I disagree. Such interpreter or emulator would preserve _some_ language semantics, but not all.
I’m talking about how a programming language specification specifies the semantics of the programming language. It usually does not specify the time and space complexity of its basic operations, be it function calls or arithmetic operators. For example, multiplication could be implemented as O(n) repeated addition instead of in constant time. That would probably be a bad implementation (even on CPUs that only support addition), but it wouldn’t violate the semantics of the programming language.