Weather expressions in Basque

Abstract

We make two claims regarding weather expressions in Basque: first, based on Eriksen et al.’s (2010) typology, we show that Basque tends towards the argument type (and less frequently so to the predicate-argument type) when coding dynamic (precipitation or other) events and to both the argument and the predicate type when coding static events; Basque often has transitive structures (i.e. both transitive predicate and argument transitive types), apparently a rare typological feature. Second, with respect to two key issues in the study of weather predicates within Generative Grammar, we claim (a) that Basque supports the view that both lexicalizations of weather verbs (unaccusative and unergative/transitive) are possible across languages, as argued by Bleotu (2015) and Levin & Krejci (2019); and (b) that the empty pro subject of Basque transitive weather constructions is closer to a quasi-argument (Chomsky 1981; Levin & Krejci 2019) rather than to a true expletive.