Why Does IT Always Rain on Me? On Weather Verbs

The aim of this article is to discuss a possible argument structure representation for weather verbs (to rain, to snow, to thunder a.o.) in the framework proposed by Hale and Keyser (2002). Starting from the idea that weather verbs sometimes take Agents as subjects, and sometimes Themes, we would like to pr opose that they can be decomposed either as V+N (rain =‘FALL RAIN”), or as CAUSE followed by V+N (‘CAUSE [FALL RAIN]’). The article brings cross-linguistic evidence in favor of this proposal, showing that weather verbs in languages across the world display an ambiguous behavior, sometimes behaving like unaccusatives, and sometimes like unergatives.