Weather verb

A weather verb is a special verb form found in English and certain other languages which, in its basic sense, is capable of taking only a dummy pronoun as its subject. It is called a weather verb since most verbs of this type are used in reference to weather activity; for instance, It's raining, It's snowing, It's cold, etc.

Weather verbs are common in other non-pro-drop languages; e.g. in German, as Es regnet ("it rains"). The situation is different in pro-drop languages, such as Italian, which do not require dummy pronouns. However, a similar process occurs in these languages: The Italian Piove ("rains"), which has no subject, is semantically identical to the English It's raining.

See also

• Valency (linguistics)