Before/After-NP Construction

This thesis looks into before/after-NP construction in English and Chinese, aiming at figuring out the type coercion mechanism governing their realization and understanding.Before/after-NP construction is formed by putting localizer after or before with other phrases to express spatial location. Previous research points out: (1) NP in before/after-NP construction could be nouns, verbs and verbal phrases; (2) this construction could express spatial and temporal meaning. In the linguistic literature, little has been done as to what kind of words or phrases could enter this construction, and why it could. Therefore, I make an analysis of before/after-NP construction from the perspective of event semantics.Type coercion suggests that predicate has semantic type requirement on its argument. When the semantic type of argument is not expected by predicate, then the lexical semantic representation will be activated. If there is an appropriate semantic type in the representation, this type will be taken out from qualia structure to satisfy the type required by predicate. According to this theory, before/after-NP constructions in English and Chinese both have type coercing ability.In before/after-NP construction, before/after as predicate, have semantic type requirement on its argument—the argument should have temporal property. However, what before/after-NP construction really needs is not event, but time point inherent in event.Event is an important platform for comparison between English and Chinese. It is assumed that many differences between English and Chinese can boil down to the difference in ways of event encoding.The type coercing abilities of before/after in English and Chinese are different: QIAN/HOU in Chinese could not force artifact noun to have some event reading, while before/after in English could. This shows that QIAN/HOU are weak in type coercing ability, so they can not co-occur with artifact noun. And the event related with artifact noun should be explicitly stated in surface form, at this point it is unnecessary to resolve to the analysis of lexical semantic level or pragmatic level; while in before/after + artifact noun construction, because of strong coercing ability of before/after, the related event of artifact noun is drawn out easily. But which event has been drawn out is not clear, then the interpretation of before/after + artifact noun construction depends on the analysis of lexical semantic level and pragmatic level.This research confirms that type coercion, as an interpretative mechanism, provides the approach for us to understand the internal semantic relationship in before/after-NP construction. But the generative ability of type coercion is too strong to explain things clearly, so conventionality should be put into consideration.