A Modal Analysis of the Cantonese Particle Gamzai

This paper offers a novel analysis to account for the semantics of the adverbial approximator gam3zai6. New data are presented, illustrating that gam3zai6 should be distinguished from its apparent scalar counterparts such as almost in English and chabuduo ‘almost’ in Mandarin Chinese. Building upon Portner’s (1998) analysis of the progressive in English, we propose a modal analysis of gam3zai6 as a prospective operator which creates an intensional context for the expressed event/state under the scope of prospectivity. We incorporate the temporal indication into the semantics of gam3zai6, enabling a unified account for the diverse interpretations of gam3zai6-sentences.