*Be surprised whether: question-to-cleft reduction

Abstract

 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.