Last month I presented my talk on the topic of semantics of mood and aspect in Nafsan at the 2020 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS), which you can see on YouTube below. I argued that different linguistic frameworks are not necessarily in conflict, as is often argued in the linguistic community. I used the case of Nafsan subject proclitics to show that we can benefit from trying to unite compositional and construction-based approaches to semantics, because they are both right! They simply explain different aspects of meaning. The construction-based approach explains how certain words need to be used together to express a certain meaning, even when their individual meanings do not add up to that meaning they have when they are together. Sometimes, a given word does not even exist as an independent word outside these combinations (constructions). On the other hand, the compositional approach explains some of the highly regular grammatical rules, which we can observe in grammar. My talk provides examples for both of these cases in Nafsan.

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