SIR2U wrote:


You have got it backwards, "The weather is raining" would be the correct way to say it. Remember that the subject does the action named by the verb not the other way round.

When you say "It is sunny" you are talking about the same thing, It is just anothe type of predicate adjective.

quickly wrote:
I'm fairly sure that the verb "to rain" has variable valence and is also impersonal. For instance, it can be used intransitively in "it's raining"; or it can be used transitively as in "it's raining cats and dogs." In an intransitive use "to rain" requires one argument (subject), and in a transitive use it requires two arguments (subject, object). English, however, because it is not a pro-drop language, requires that all intransitive verbs have one argument. The problem arises with impersonal verbs, which are syntactically intransitive, and English's requirement that each verb have at least one verb argument. When you say "It is raining," PRO does not actually reference a specific thing of which the verbal ("raining") is predicated of. So the subject position becomes occupied by a dummy subject, PRO "it." This arises because syntactically the verb is intransitive (requires subject), but semantically it is impersonal, and thus requires that its argument be fulfilled, although it is not actually in reference to some thing.

I think pragmatically some other posters have been correct. A pronoun's reference occurs only when contextually specified, because they are deictic. Pronouns are said to have an origo which specifies the spatiotemporal location of the reference of the pronoun, like most deictic utterances which specify both time and place, e.g., demonstratives in a discourse or egocentric pronouns or adjectives such as "I" or "my." But when the impersonal dummy pronoun is used with impersonal verbs, "it" takes on a variety of meanings, and seems to have semantic content when in fact is only present because English requires, syntactically, the argument to be fulfilled. My guess would be that "it" fulfills certain implication and entailment rules of pragmatic discourse, and thus does have meaning, but whether the pronominal phrase or the verb itself is supplying these conditions I'm uncertain of.

If it was raining, and you merely spoke the noun "rain" or verbal "raining," the same pragmatic conditions for the truth of the utterance would be required as if you said "It is raining." So it would seem as though "it" is not giving information, but only making the utterance grammatical.