I wanted to leave the question title as is so as not to take away from my amusement :).
Anyway,
It's raining.
What is raining? Is it the sky? The clouds? The weather? The rain? What is "it"? Any historical insights on the statement?
11 Answers
Definitions for it in my Webster's 3rd New International Dictionary include:
2a used as an expletive subject of an impersonal verb that expresses a simple condition or an action without implied reference to an agent about the weather ... or time.
It is raining or It is two o'clock are examples of 2a.
2b used as an expletive subject in other statements or questions having an undefined subject
If it hadn't been for your help, I couldn't have finished in time is an example of 2b.
3a used as an anticipatory subject of a verb whose logical subject is another word or phrase or clause
It is I who have the answer to the question is an example of 3a.
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4Your last example, “It is I who have the answer…” feels borderline ungrammatical to me — I really want the verb to agree with it! “It is I who has the answer” feels somewhat better, but still jarring. I’ve never seen this construction discussed technically, though, so it may be just me: is either version more widely used or accepted, or considered more correct, than the other, do you know? “It is Robusto who has the answer…” would be a less debatable example, in any case :-)– PLLJan 28, 2011 at 4:55
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Hmmm… actually, in an analogous case, “It’s the comments that make StackExchange a great system!” is definitely correct, not “*It’s the comments that makes…”, so I guess the verb does generally agree with the noun phrase in this construction, not with “it”. And indeed, googling around, the very form you use is well-attested in literature: “Behold, it is I who have created the smith that bloweth in the fire of coal…” appears in some Bible translations! So maybe it is just I who find your example strange? (Golly, I still really prefer “It is just I who finds…”! Or “It’s just me that finds…” :-P)– PLLJan 28, 2011 at 5:02
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1@PLL: Google Books reports 79K hits for "It is I who has", against 210K for "It is I who have". Just as in your "comments" example, it is very much a dummy pronoun that barely even gets a vote in the verb agreement. Mar 20, 2012 at 20:21
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1Regarding previous comments: The Austrian writer and language-fanatic Karl Kraus wrote several essays about the analogous construction in German (which is very similar to the English one) in the 1920s and 30s. He addresses the question whether the "it" or the "I" rules the verb too. I'm afraid these essays have not been translated. Jan 17, 2017 at 21:26
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Sometimes, there is an arguably retrievable referent for dummy it: 'Jill's hamster has died.' ... 'Yes, it's sad' ('this eventuality / situation resulting'). '[The time] is 7 pm.' With 'weather it', I'm stymied. // How standardised are the terms 'expletive subject', 'anticipatory subject' and 'logical subject'? M-W seems to say that 'It is I who need a doctor' has two subjects. Jul 7 at 14:22
Nothing.
In some languages, a subject is always present in the sentence, even when conceptually there is no subject. English is one of them, as well as French ("il pleut" for "it's raining").
In other languages, like Portuguese for example, you don't use any word for the subject when it doesn't exist. We say "chove" (just the verb) for "it's raining".
Well, the short answer is that it does not matter. The widely accepted explanation is that the “it” in “it is raining” does not refer to anything.
If you are curious, the verb “rain” is sometimes used with a subject such as the sky and clouds. The Oxford English Dictionary (the link requires subscription) gives many examples of this usage from Old English to the twentieth century. One of them is:
1972 Nature 24 Mar. 139/1 The primary purpose of the experiments with seeding clouds was to increase the amount of rain from the clouds, or to cause them to rain if they would not otherwise have done so.
(Emphasis added on “cause them to rain.”)
Note that I am not implying that the “it” in “it is raining” actually refers to the clouds or the sky.
answered Nov 28, 2010 at 2:59
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1+1 for using the dummy pronoun in your first sentence, as if by accident. Mar 22, 2014 at 15:36
It isn't referring to anything specific. It's just a grammatical construct of English, which requires that sentences have a subject. Other languages like Latin or Japanese (known as pro-drop languages) don't require an explicit subject and omit the it. You can, for example, express the same meaning simply with "pluit" (Latin).
"It" doesn't refer to anything here. It's just a stand-in for the subject. "It" is the noun of the sentence, but it is not behaving as a traditional referent.
Standard English syntax requires a subject and a verb in each sentence, but some ideas become bogged down by this. To say for example, "The sky is raining," in English is obvious. However, English has evolved into very simple nouns and verbs (and all the rest). We don't deal in declensions anymore, and as our verb conjugation is comparatively very simple, it does sometimes lead to a few awkward structures.
In Spanish, we'd just say, "Está lloviendo." Verb + Gerund. The verb construction is third person singular and in that context just implies a state of being.
Or, in Latin, it would be "pluit", which can mean, "It rains" (habitual), "It is raining" (current action), or "It does rain" (emphatic). Alas, Latin is both awesome and at the same time terribly, terribly limiting.
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Outstanding first post, Mary Beth. Welcome to the Stack! I hope you don't mind that I took the liberty of editing your post a bit to make it a mite more clear. Mar 26, 2011 at 10:25
This is a workaround to plug avalent verbs into the rigid English sentence structure.
answered Nov 29, 2010 at 11:14
Raining reflects a state; the unresolved it – in the absence of another anchor – defaults to referencing our global environment or world state.
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1More to the point, this seems to imply that you could say, Our global environment is raining or The state of the world is raining. Neither one sounds correct to me. Mar 27, 2011 at 1:25
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Well, at risk of putting words in someone else's mouth, I think Leondz means that the word "it" is representing a concept for the state of the world or some such, not that you could substitute the specific words "the state of the world" for "it" in such sentences. Like if I say that "I" means "a reference to one's self" (to quote a handy dictionary), that doesn't mean that you could rewrite the sentence "I went to the store" as "A reference to one's self went to the store."– JayMar 20, 2012 at 17:08
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1Leondz is expressing a dissenting view of the "weather it" that "it" refers to "a general state of affairs in the context of the utterance", (from the Wikipedia article on dummy pronouns).– outisMar 23, 2014 at 21:39
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It is raining, it is three o'clock, and it is nice to see you. It is difficult to understand what "it" means, but it is worth thinking about, and it may be possible to work out an answer.– WS2Oct 8, 2018 at 21:30
This question was asked at Reddit -
This is a perfectly good question (albeit one not dealt with much by philosophers), and a bunch of the responses in this thread are total shit.
Anyway, the "it" in "it is raining" is pleonastic (the wikipedia article isn't great, but it'll do). As the Wiki notes, pleonastic pronouns are generally considered to be "empty"; they have no reference whatsoever. Instead, they're inserted because English (and many other languages!) lacks the resources to express claims that do not have a subject. "Raining" on it's own, for example, is ungrammatical, so a "dummy pronoun" is inserted into the sentence so that it will fit the proper syntactic structure of English. (EDIT: I should note that I don't mean to imply that this is a conscious process, rather, it's the sort of thing that we do unconsciously, and the "reason" is inferred by linguists on the basis of other data.)
I don't know if any philosophers have spent significant amount of time attempting to argue what the proper truth-makers for these sentences are. When I last discussed them I think we broadly assumed that a correct paraphrase was something like "there is rain in this vicinity," but it's quite possible that a close analysis would reveal that the pleonastic "it" is actually an ineliminable quirk of our language in some situations.
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Apart from copy/paste the post from reddit, do you have anything else to offer? Also, you should source the quote. Jun 7, 2019 at 16:08
In the sentence It is raining, Merriam-Webster states (In reference to it):
used as subject of an impersonal verb that expresses a condition or action without reference to an agent
In other words, it has no identifiable character in this context.
Just musing ...
Suppose your child says "My friend Sally's dog died," and you reply, "Yes, it is sad." Who or what is being "sad"? Sally may be sad, but your comment isn't really about Sally. The dog isn't sad -- he's dead. (Or if dogs have immortal souls, maybe he's sad and maybe he isn't, but in either case that's not what you're trying to say.) Really you're saying that the fact that pets die is a thing that causes general sadness for humanity.
Or if a physics teacher asks, "Do you understand why photons cannot penetrate an opaque barrier?", a student might reply, "It is clear." What is "it"? Certainly the opaque barrier is not "clear". :-) Myabe the concept being discussed is clear. Maybe in this case you could say that "it" is "my understanding of the concept being discussed".
One could go on with other examples. My point is that in such sentences, "it" is a very amorphous word, I don't think you could pin down a single thing for it to refer to in any such sentence. Rather, the reader is supposed to intuit it from the context.
Here it can refer to a condition that something is happening, i.e. rain.
:)