Talking about the weather: Two construals of precipitation events in English

Abstract

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.