Cleft wh-questions as biclausal structures. A comparison with simple wh-questions, cleft declaratives, and focalizations

The aim of the paper is to contribute to the debate on the internal structure of cleft sentences by (i) analysing the distribution of subjunctive mood, lexical subjects, and perché ‘why’ in Italian declarative and interrogative cleft sentences and (ii) discussing a difference between simple and cleft wh-questions. While simple wh-questions with marginalized DPs (in the sense of Antinucci and Cinque 1977 and Cardinaletti 2001, 2002) are ambiguous between a subject and an object reading of those DPs, cleft wh-questions are not ambiguous: The marginalized material can only be the subject. The paper investigates the syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic properties of cleft wh-questions and compares them to simple wh-questions, cleft declaratives, and focalizations.