On the embeddability of cleft wh-questions in Japanese

Hiraiwa & Ishihara (2002, 2012) argue that the derivation of Japanese clefts involves movement of a focused element to FocP. Even though their analysis seems successful, I point out a hitherto unacknowledged fact that embedding a cleft wh-question degrades a sentence, which is hard to explain with their analysis if it is taken at its face value. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to elaborate on their analysis: I claim that the two focus-related features, [±exhaustivity] and [±sharing-presupposition], induce the focus movement in clefts. The paper further discusses ReportP-size clauses (e.g., Saito 2010) based on my proposal.