Modal Pathways: A Test Case

Aynat Rubinstein

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-85292-3_14

Modal Pathways: A Test Case

Aynat Rubinstein^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

Abstract

Recent years have seen increasing discussion of formal semantic approaches to language change, where semantics rather than pragmatics is taken to be the main driving force of historical change. This paper discusses the applicability of such approaches to pathways of change in the modal domain, focusing on the temporal-to-concessive pathway as a test case. A corpus study of the development of concessive ʕadayin ‘still’ in Emergent Modern Hebrew (EMH) is argued to support the semantic approach over an alternative that is based primarily on pragmatic inferencing.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
Publisher	Springer International Publishing
Pages	411-432
Number of pages	22
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-85292-3_14
State	Published - 2025

Publication series

Name	Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
Volume	Part F11859
ISSN (Print)	2524-4248
ISSN (Electronic)	2524-4256

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Keywords

Concessives
Hebrew
Modality
Semantic change

Access to Document

10.1007/978-3-031-85292-3_14

Cite this

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Modal Pathways: A Test Case

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