Tracking Auxiliary Come in Hebrew

The paper proposes a research plan to investigate lexical profiles of verbs that are also known to take part in multiverb constructions. This is an attempt to see whether there is a principled connection between such lexical profiles and a verb’s availability as an auxiliary verb, developing an idea by Wilkins and Hill (Cognitive Linguistics 6:209, 1995). Such a perspective may allow to break down the rather opaque term “semantic bleaching” by focusing on those meaning components that are preserved and not on those that are presumably lost when a lexical verb is used as an auxiliary, where often in the literature researchers pay attention to the loss of the motion meaning component. If on the right track, the hope is that this research plan will allow to build a larger consistent picture of patterns of lexical change, instead of looking at come and go as typical deictic motion verbs, as is often the case. In order to achieve this, the paper consists of a close examination of the lexical semantic profile of the deictic motion verb bwʾ roughly come in three stages of Hebrew: Biblical Hebrew, Rabbinic Hebrew and Modern Hebrew, and its distribution in two types of multiverb constructions. The observed correlation leads to formulating hypotheses as to the necessity of goal and deixis meaning components for bwʾ to appear in futurity-related multiverb constructions and counter-to-expectation pseudo-coordination, respectively.