Japanese/Korean Linguistics

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.