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.