There is a light (verb) that sometimes goes out in weather verbs

In this paper, we would like to argue in favour of the decomposition of weather verbs into light verbs and weather nouns, in the framework of Hale & Keyser (2002). A verb like piove (‘rain’, Italian), for example, can be decomposed into FALL [RAIN] or CAUSE [FALL [RAIN]], depending upon the unaccusative or unergative use of the weather verb. The idea of decomposing weather verbs is supported by explicit weather paraphrases in many languages across the world: weather paraphrases are present either as an alternative way of referring to the weather, apart from weather verbs, as in Romanian, Italian a.o, or as the only way of referring to the weather, as in Chinese, where there are no weather verbs. Moreover, there are languages (such as Finnish or Hungarian) in which the verb for raining is the same as the verb for falling -a phenomenon that has been labeled in the literature as ‘generalized p-encoding.’ (Eriksen, Kittilä & Kolehmainen 2010: 26). This suggests that the conflation theory of Hale & Keyser (2002) is the adequate way of coping with weather verbs, since incorporation seems to have taken place. The verb FALL is, however, not the only light motion verb that can occur in weather contexts, we also find verbs like BE, COME, GIVE a.o. Since FALL and GIVE are heavier than BE or COME from a semantic point of view, one can set a scale of lightness/ heaviness. Taking this into account, the paper argues for the idea that it would be very elegant from a theoretical point of view to reduce light verbs to a limited set, and, hence, it proposes to decompose the ‘heavier’ light verbs into primitive predicates.