The Syntax of hou 後 in Temporal Phrases in Han Period Chinese

摘要

In this paper a unified account of the syntax of temporal phrases with the locative morpheme hou 後 followed by a NP_(temp,) a measure NP, is presented. Identical to bare noun phrase temporal adverbials, hou-phrases predominantly occur in sentence-initial/topic position and establish the temporal frame for the situation the predicate refers to; by default they refer to a point of time. According to the analysis presented, hou explicitly serves to relate one situation to a previous situation in the narrative; the NP_(temp,) measures the interval, the period of time, elapsed since the previous situation took place, and accordingly the NP_(temp,) is analysed as an appositional measure phrase. This analysis of the NP_(temp,) yields an analysis of hou 後 as an adverbially employed noun which syntactically retains its nominal characteristics and thus permits the addition of an apposition. Additionally, the nominal analysis of hou is the only one which accounts for all syntactic variants of the hou-phrase in Han period Chinese.