What is Raining? English Weather "it" Revisited

Abstract

<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>

Weather in Polish: A Contribution to the Typology of Meteorological Constructions

“…This especially applies to weather verbs and the status of their subjects as expletive, dummy, etc. (see Krejci 2014). For instance, weather verbs have widely been discussed in Germanic (Levin 1993, Bleotu 2012, 2013 and Romance (Beninc a & Cinque 1992, Manente 2007, Paykin 2010, Meulleman & Stockman 2013 languages with respect to their syntactic properties and possible unaccusativity or unergativity.…”

Complex copula systems as suppletive allomorphy

“…(5) instantiates (3) without YP, and (6) instantiates (3) without XP. One might assume that weather tantiate (3) with both XP and YP missing, but see Krejci (2014) for arguments that such predicates e a thematic external argument. It may be that no verb instantiates (3) with both XP and YP sue of whether this is true (and if so, why) goes beyond the scope of this paper.…”