Does the verb 'rain' belong to some special class of verbs since its subject is always 'it'?


The subject of the verb 'rain' is always 'it' when the referred sense of the verb is 'rain fall'



It rained heavily last night.


Do you think it will rain again this evening?



It looks as though the pronoun 'it', despite functioning as the subject of the verb 'rain', is merely acting as some sort of structural complement without adding anything to the meaning of the sentence.


Does that make the verb 'rain' distinctive and add it to a special class of verbs?



Answer



Yes, it belongs to a special "Zero-argument" class of verb.


Normally predicates take 1, 2, or 3 arguments;
respectively, these are called Intransitive, Transitive, and Bitransitive:



  1. Bill arrived. ARRIVE (BILL) Subject only

  2. Sarah greeted Bill. GREET (SARAH, BILL) Subject and Direct Object

  3. Bill gave Sarah a gift. GIVE (BILL, GIFT, SARAH) Subject, Direct, and Indirect Objects


But not all predicates have arguments. This is rare, but weather predicates are a case in point. Weather just happens, and nothing is implicated culturally in its occurrence, beside the event itself.



  • It's raining. RAIN () Dummy it subject.


The dummy subject here is called "Ambient it", to distinguish it from the "Distance it" of



  • It's a long way to Tipperary.


and the "Extraposition it" of



  • It's difficult for me to understand this.


In languages that aren't as fussy about subjects as English, the verb rain by itself (suitably inflected if necessary) is a complete sentence. In Indonesian, hujan means 'rain', both verb and noun, and "Hujan!" is an ordinary sentence that means, unsurprisingly, 'It's raining!'. Just like the English utterance "Rain!".


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