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.

From meteorology to linguistics: what precipitation constructions in English, French and Spanish tell us about arguments, argumenthood, and the architecture of the grammar

“…The possibility of dual behaviour within the same language has been noted in Italian (Benincà & Cinque 1992). Recently, the same has been suggested for English (Levin & Krejci 2019).…”

“…; are (1b) and (1c) alternating structures?, if so, what type of alternation do they represent? While most of these questions have been addressed in previous studies, a less discussed topic is the argument status of the elements that appear in them, Paykin (2010), and Levin & Krejci (2019) being two exceptions to this claim. Interestingly, their characterizations are different.…”

“…(Ruwet 1987: 322) the rain falls explrained.3sg at big drops 'It rained heavily.' Levin & Krejci (2019), on the other hand, argue that both weather-it and the DP are arguments in English, and propose that precipitation verbs can be construed as substance emission, (7), and directed motion events, (8). In their analysis, the alternation between the two configurations arises from the fact that the root lexicalizes only a small number of the attributes of the happenings it is used to describe.…”

“…Treating both contexts along the same lines is a common practice in most works, e.g., Ruwet (1987), Calzado Roldán (2001), Meulleman & Stockman (2013), Levin & Krejci (2019), among others. This, however, has contributed to blur some of the properties of canonical precipitation structures.…”

Directionality of Atmospheric Water in Chinese: A Lexical Semantic Study Based on Linguistic Ontology

“…An unaccusative verb (e.g., fall) takes an internal argument which typically undergoes change of state, while an unergative verb (e.g., run) takes an external argument which initiates change. The debate on the unaccusative versus unergative status of weather verbs has been going on for decades (Levin & Krejci, 2019). In the case of Chinese, Y.-H. A.…”