This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.In this paper a unified account of the syntax of temporal phrases with the locative morphemehou後 followed by a NPtemp, 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,houexplicitly serves to relate one situation to a previous situation in the narrative; the NPtempmeasures the interval, the period of time, elapsed since the previous situation took place, and accordingly the NPtempis analysed as an appositional measure phrase. This analysis of the NPtempyields an analysis ofhou後 as an adverbially employed noun which syntactically retains its nominal characteristics and thus permits the addition of an apposition. Additionally, the nominal analysis ofhouis the only one which accounts for all syntactic variants of thehou-phrase in Han period Chinese.Peer Reviewe
