In this paper a unified account of the syntax of temporal phrases with the locative morpheme hou 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, hou explicitly serves to relate one situation to a previous situation in the narrative; the NPtemp measures the interval, the period of time, elapsed since the previous situation took place, and accordingly the NPtemp is analysed as an appositional measure phrase. This analysis of the NPtemp 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.

In this paper, a synchronic study of the syntax and the semantics of the causative verb shi in Han period Chinese, particularly in combination with negatives, is at issue. Two different structures involving negation of this verb exist in Han period Chinese: first, (NP1) NEGshi NP2 V2P and second (NP1) shi NP2NEG V2P. A thorough analysis of the first structure ‘(NP1) NEGshi NP2 V2P' shows that two different semantic interpretations are required to account for the syntactic differences between the two structures. The article proposes that the first structure has to be analysed as an analytic causative construction with a visible causative verb which, in its negated form, contrasts with an affirmative causative construction. The negative has scope over the entire causative construction including V1 and V2P, whereas in the second structure the negative has only scope over V2P