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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2010
In this paper a unified account of the syntax oftemporal phrases with the locative morphemehou 後 followed by aNPtemp, a measure NP, is presented.Identical to bare noun phrase temporal adverbials,hou-phrases predominantly occurin sentence-initial/topic position and establish thetemporal frame for the situation the predicaterefers to; by default they refer to a point of time.According to the analysis presented,hou explicitly serves to relateone situation to a previous situation in thenarrative; the NPtemp measures theinterval, the period of time, elapsed since theprevious situation took place, and accordingly theNPtemp is analysed as an appositionalmeasure phrase. This analysis of theNPtemp yields an analysis ofhou 後 as an adverbially employednoun which syntactically retains its nominalcharacteristics and thus permits the addition of anapposition. Additionally, the nominal analysis ofhou is the only one whichaccounts for all syntactic variants of thehou-phrase in Han periodChinese.