Event Coercion of Mandarin Chinese Temporal Connective hou 'after'

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 houconstruction (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.