על מקורות משמעות הרצון של פועל התנועה "בא": [מתוך המדור: סמנטיקה]

In a development that has been dated to the 1960s, Modern Hebrew has expanded the range of uses of its age-old motion verb ba "come" to also include the expression of desire.This paper evaluates a recent proposal that views this change as are sult of language contact between Hebrew and Arabic, based on anidiosyncratic similarity between ba le- "come to" in Hebrew and aphonetically similar figurative expression of desire in Arabic.I present novel textual evidence that suggests an earlier emergence of the construction in Hebrew, already in the early 1950s, and without clear outside influence. These findings raise the possibility that ba of desire was an internal development in Hebrew. I trace its development and present supporting evidence for the hypothesis of endogenesis based on parallel constructions in other languages.