Everything about Weather Verb totally explained
In
linguistics, an
impersonal verb is a
verb that can't take a true
subject, because it doesn't represent an action, occurrence, or state-of-being of any specific person, place, or thing. The term
weather verb is also sometimes used, since such weather-indicating verbs as
to rain are usually impersonal.
In some
languages, such as
English,
French,
German and
Dutch, an impersonal verb always takes an impersonal pronoun (
it in English,
il in French,
es in German,
het in Dutch) as its syntactical subject:
» It snowed yesterday. (English)
Il a neigé hier. (French)
» Es schneite gestern. (German)
Het sneeuwde gisteren. (Dutch)
In some other languages (necessarily
null subject languages and typically
pro-drop languages), such as
Portuguese,
Spanish,
Occitan,
Catalan,
Italian,
Romanian, and all the
Slavic languages, an impersonal verb takes no
subject at all, but it's
conjugated in the
third-person singular, which is much as though it had a third-person, singular subject:
» Nevó ayer. (Spanish)
Nevou ontem. (Portuguese)
» Sniježilo je jučer. (Croatian)
In the
auxiliary language
Interlingua, verbs are not conjugated by person. Impersonal verbs take the pronoun
il:
» Il ha nivate heri. (Interlingua)
In the planned auxiliary language
Esperanto, where verbs also are not conjugated for person, impersonal verbs are simply stated with no subject given or implied:
» Neĝis hieraŭ. (Esperanto)
Verbs meaning
existence may also be impersonal.
» "There are (some) books." / "There is a book."
Há livros. /
Há um livro. (Portuguese)
» Hay libros. /
Hay un libro. (Spanish)
However, sometimes there are
intransitive verbs with more or less the same
meaning:
» "(Some) books exist." / "A book exists."
Existem livros. /
Existe um livro. (Portuguese)
» Existen libros. /
Existe un libro. (Spanish)
An impersonal verb is different from a
defective verb in that with an impersonal verb, only one possible syntactical subject is meaningful (either expressed or not), whereas with a defective verb, certain choices of subject might not grammatically possible, because the verb doesn't have a complete conjugation.
Some linguists consider the impersonal subject of weather verbs to be "
dummy pronouns", while others interpret them differently.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Weather Verb'.
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