Presupposition in two types of interrogative clefts

Abstract

There are two hypotheses in the linguistic literature on the type of presupposition expressed in cleft sentences, whether an existential presupposition or an exhaustiveness presupposition (see BÜRING; KRIŽ 2013; POLLARD; YASAVUL, 2016; MENUZZI, 2018), but the works on this topic focus only on declarative clefts. In this squib, I show that Brazilian Portuguese (BP) has two types of interrogative clefts: i.e. polar clefts and WH clefts (which should not be confused with the more common “WH that…” or “WH is that” interrogatives, which often are named “cleft interrogatives”, but display a different structure) (cf. XXXX ). I raise the question of what such data can tell about the type of presupposition encoded in cleft constructions. I show that BP interrogative clefts provide contradictory evidence regarding the presupposition type. Cleft polar questions, unlike non-cleft polar questions, have an existential presupposition and apparently also display an exhaustive interpretation, but accept the test by Menuzzi (2018) of adding the adverb somente (‘only’), which is incompatible with the exhaustiveness presupposition. Cleft WH questions, on the other hand, surprisingly  do not differ from non-cleft WH questions: both have an existential presupposition and an exhaustive interpretation. Such data bring additional difficulty to any account on the type of presupposition expressed in cleft sentences.