Weather expressions such as It is raining have proven challenging for linguistic researchers; not only do weather expressions often have special linguistic properties, but languages show considerable variation in the morphosyntactic expression of such events. The main claim pursued here is that, in English, precipitation happenings can be linguistically construed as events (in the sense of Levin & Rappaport Hovav 2005) in two ways: as substance emission events-the sky is construed as emitting the precipitation-or as directed motion events-the precipitation is construed as moving down towards the earth due to gravity. Each construal involves a distinct event structure and, thus, is associated with its own pattern of syntactic behavior. When a precipitation happening is construed as a substance emission event, a type of activity, the verb expressing it shows the hallmarks of an unergative. When a precipitation happening or a substance emission happening is construed as a directed motion event, a type of scalar change event, the verb expressing it shows the hallmarks of an unaccusative. This paper focuses on English, but briefly discusses how the proposed analysis of English can illuminate the diverse behavior of weather verbs across languages. The availability of two construals sheds light on the expression of precipitation events in Romance languages, particularly on the continuing controversy about whether weather verbs are unaccusative or unergative.

Previous studies of agreement variation in existential there constructions treat the variable as binary, distinguishing between agreeing and nonagreeing variants. Using new data from a corpus of English spoken in California, we argue that this widely studied variable cannot be fully understood without instead making a three-way distinction between agreement (there are/were + plural), nonagreement using a full form of the verb (there is/was + plural), and nonagreement using there's. We motivate this three-way distinction by showing that the two nonagreeing variants differ in their distributions with respect to polarity and determiner type, as well as speaker age and education level. Full form nonagreement is more frequent among speakers with less formal education, while there's is favored by younger speakers. These results suggest that the two nonagreeing variants differ in their longitudinal trajectories, a finding that would be obscured in an analysis that makes only a binary distinction between variants.

<p class="western">Weather expressions like “it is raining” encode events in which it is difficult to identify distinct thematic participants. While the “it” of English weather expressions is often analyzed as an expletive subject that is not semantically selected by the verb, other authors argue that “it” is referential or semi-referential (Bolinger 1973, Chomsky 1981). Here, I provide new evidence that weather “it” is semantically contentful, differing from true expletives. Further, I argue that weather verbs like “rain” and “snow” form a class with verbs of substance emission like “gush” and “drip” (Levin 1993) based on their analogous semantic and syntactic behavior.</p>

Antireflexivization as a Causativization Strategy