Event Coercion of Mandarin Chinese Temporal Connective hou ‘after’

Copyright 2012 by Zuoyan Song 26th Pacific Asia Conference on Language,Information and Computation pages 602–608 Event Coercion of Mandarin Chinese Temporal Connective hou ‘after’ Zuoyan Song School of Chinese Language and Literature Beijing Normal University Beijing, China meszy@163.com Abstract Unlike its English equivalent after, which often takes NP complement, Chinese temporal connective hou tends to take VP complement. In terms of type coercion, while after seems to generally license event coercion, Chinese hou does not (with a few exceptions), as in most cases the presence of a verb is required for the hou- construction (and the sentence) to be correct. Rather than attributing this difference to the different lexicalization of nouns in these two languages, this paper argues that it is due to the difference between hou and after. In particular, hou is weaker in its coercion force than after because of its polysemy. It is either a temporal connective or a locative connective. 1 Introduction Natural language often leaves many meaning facets unexpressed in the surface form, which will lead to type-mismatch, underspecification or semantic incongruity. For example, there is some covert event meaning in the sequence in (1), which must be recovered in understanding or interpretation. Type mismatch occurs because the book is an entity type and begin requires its complement to be an event type. (1) John began the book. The theory of Generative Lexicon (Pustejovsky,1995,2001,2006) proposes in particular that the mismatch is solved by the operation of type coercion, which is defined as follows (Pustejovsky, 1995: 111). (2) Type Coercion A semantic operation that converts an argument to the type which is expected by a function where it would otherwise result in a type error. It is redefined as (3) (Pustejovsky, 2006). (3)Type Coercion: the type a function requires is imposed on the argument type. This is accomplished by either: ①Exploitation: taking a part of the argument’s type to satisfy the function; ②Introduction: wrapping the argument with the type required by the function. In essence, it confers to the predicate the ability to change the argument type. The eventive verb begin in (1) coerces its argument to assume an event type (i.e. read/write the book) from an entity type (i.e. the book). Read and write are the telic role and agentive role of book respectively. The type coercion discussed above will be called event coercion below, which makes an entity type shift to an event type. Similarly, some temporal connectives can coerce its complement to be an event type. Consider the following examples. Some events like eating dessert and drinking coffee can be reconstructed respectively (Pustejovsky, 1995:231). (4) Let’s leave after dessert. (5) Let’s leave after the coffee. 602 (6) is a case of French temporal connective après (Godard & Jayez, 1993 ). (6) Après ce livre, je me seas fatigué. After this book I feel tired. Lin & Liu (2005) claim that most of the coercion mechanisms postulated by GL do not seem to work in Mandarin Chinese. While event coercion mechanism works in English …

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