You say that it’s raining or it’s cold, but what exactly is it? Sometimes called the weather it or the dummy it, this it in this case is a placeholder that makes sentence work grammatically. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “What is the “It” in “It’s Raining”?”
Hello there. You have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Mike O’Sullivan in Blacksburg, Virginia.
What can we do for you, Mike?
Well, it is nice and warm today here in Blacksburg. It’s not too windy. It’s sunny, but it looks like it’s going to be cloudy tomorrow, and it’s probably going to snow by the end of the week.
So my question for you is, what is it? What is this it that is sunny and warm and it snows and it’s cloudy? And why don’t we have a more specific word for it?
Oh, that’s a good question. So you’re using this it, and ordinarily it’s a pronoun, so it should refer to something, but it doesn’t really seem to be referring to something, right?
That’s right. If I’d say give me it, ordinarily you’d know what I was referring to. It’d be a book or a magazine or a piece of food, right? But there’s no it when it’s raining. Do we mean the sky or do we mean the environment? I’m picturing cousin it from the Addams Family.
So this is, interestingly, that it is sometimes called the weather it. W-E-A-T-H-E-R, the weather it, because it so often occurs in expressions of weather. But more often it’s called the dummy it, and not because it’s dumb or ignorant, but because it fills a place. Is kind of it’s a placeholder it’s in an inactive unit and so in general it appears where a subject or object could or should appear according to the rules of english syntax but in this case it doesn’t because the sentence in question doesn’t really have a subject or an object sometimes it’s because it’s delayed or moved elsewhere in the sentence or sometimes it’s because it’s understood but not specified.
So with it snowing or it snows, what’s the it? It’s nothing. There’s no antecedent. The pronoun it isn’t standing in for any noun previously mentioned. We just do it because English syntax fires off these alarm bells in our heads if we just say snows, snowing, without a subject, right? Right. We do sometimes say snowing out there. You you know, you come in, you shake off your boots and your hat, and we can say snowing out there and get away with it. But in that case, the dummy it is simply a deleted subject where we still understand that that it snowing out there is still unsaid, but it’s there somewhere. And we just can’t get away without having a subject in that sentence.
And then the other way, we can say it’s true that it snowed last night. That it is what’s called a delayed subject. So it snowed last night is the subject, but it’s at the end of the sentence and not the beginning. So the antecedent isn’t an antecedent because it doesn’t come before it comes after. And I know that’s complicated, but there you go. Grammar is weird.
Michael, thank you so much for calling. Take care now. It’s been fun. Thank you.
It’s been fun? You mean the conversation? It has.
Okay. All right. Thanks, Michael. Bye.
English is weird. Let’s talk about it.
