*Be surprised whether: question-to-cleft reduction

Advisor/Collaborator: Prof. Yimei Xiang

Committee member: Prof. Simon Charlow, Prof. Michael Glanzberg

Second Qualifying Paper (defended 12/30/2022)

We propose a question-to-cleft reduction account to explain why emotive factives (e.g., be surprised) cannot embed whether questions. First, drawing on the distinct anaphor-licensing patterns of wh- and whether-questions, we discern discourse referents that may serve as short answers to questions, termed ‘answer discourse referents (ans-drefs)’. Next, we argue that questions embedded under emotive factives are always reduced to clefts. This reduction requires to extract a unique ans-dref from the embedded question, which is possible in wh-embeddings but not in whether-embeddings.