A Simple Phrase Analysis of Psychological Adverbs in Japanese

This paper focus on the syntactic properties of psychological adverbs (PAs) constructions in Japanese. Matsuoka (2021, 2023) argues that PAs in Japanese have a CP structure, in which the experiencer PPs occupy Spec, TP of the PAs, and a null operator movement to Spec, CP is involved. However, I argue that the evidence in Matsuoka (2021, 2023) is faced with serious problems in both empirical and theoretical respects; therefore a new analysis is called for. I propose that PAs in Japanese have a simpler structure, in which neither TP nor CP is projected, and that the experiencer PPs are not syntactically included in PAs; they are adjoined to VP. It is also shown that the structure proposed can account for the various syntactic properties of PAs in Japanese, demonstrating the validity of my proposal.