Event Coercion of ¨Noun + time postposition¨ construction in Chinese and comparative study with Spanish: a perspective of the extended Qualia Structure

Abstract

The present work, based on the Theory of the Generative Lexicon (TLG) (Pustejovsky, 1995), tries to provide a detailed and in-depth interpretation of the phenomena of the Type Mismatch and the Type shift in the construction ¨Noun + time postposition¨. For this, an analysis of the most representative cases will be carried out, in this case, the temporal postpositions 后hou/之后zhihou/以后 yihou (HOU). In turn, its equivalents in Spanish will be taken as a reference, such as the temporary adverbial connector Después de (Vanderschueren 2013), in order to investigate how the semantic generative mechanism Event Coercion operates in Chinese. The canonical construction (Chomsky 1986) ¨Noun + time postposition¨ has the function of locating an event within a time axis, where the complement is required to be a noun of time, such as: a point of time (the moment of the event), a reference time point (the reference moment), or a time point of the enunciation (the moment of the enunciation). When the position of the complement presents an event or non-event noun, the temporary postponement will require that said noun be or be converted to the delimited event, from which a point in time can be derived. In such a process of the transition type, the atypical event noun will be coerced by its determinant, and it will go from non-delimited event noun to delimited. The non-event noun is directly coerced by the temporary postponement, and will change from a non-event noun to a delimited event one, to satisfy the requirement of temporary postpositions such as Hou. However, not all non-event noun can be used in the coerced construction ¨Noun + time postposition¨, only the sequential nouns (Ma 1991) can appear in the position of the complement in said construction, thanks to the fact that the sub-trait Lexicon [Contextual Temporality] ([TC]) (Liu 2004) enables them to obtain the eventual interpretation. Finally, the present study deduces a formal logic of the Chinese syntactic process, in which Type coercion works. This logical form would favor a dynamic perspective of the lexical relations between the different types of nouns and temporal postpositions, and in turn, allows us to clearly see the stages in which the type mismatch has been experienced. The results allow us to observe that the TLG proposal can explain how the generative mechanism Event Coercion operates in the construction ¨Noun + time postposition¨, however, it is necessary to broaden the perspective of the analysis of the Qualia Structure (EQ) to the Structure Qualia Extentida (EQE) (Yuan 2014).