The subject in 'It is raining.'
This was a good topic to steal from the repertoire of @Banno over at the old PF.
The question is the following:
=====
Where is the subject in the following sentence:
"It is raining."
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I think I know the answer if memory serves me right, which I think I'll hold off on revealing.
The question is the following:
=====
Where is the subject in the following sentence:
"It is raining."
=====
I think I know the answer if memory serves me right, which I think I'll hold off on revealing.
Comments (108)
(Well, or i should clarify "What I'd normally take the subject to be in lieu of other information" . . . I dont want to suggest objectivist semantics.)
What's that? the rain?
You don't know what "climatological conditions outside" refers to?
Just do one word at a time:
Outside, or outdoors, not inside/indoors.
Conditions--what the status of something is, what it's like
Climatological, or rather I should have said meteorological --so that we're talking about the weather conditions outside and not something else.
That's the subject of the sentence.
So, it's the 'rain' yes?
No, the subject of the sentence is not a reference to itself. The rain isnt raining.
Your question has been answered, the subject of that sentence is the weather conditions.
Now what? You said this was an interesting topic...sorry, you said it was good. How so?
So, the subject is the fact that it is raining by the weather conditions? Is that what "it" is pointing at in the sentence; "it is raining"?
How so? Your getting close to "it".
But, "raining" or "to rain" is a verb, not a subject.
Quoting Banno
Every sentence has a subject (explicitly stated or 'understood') and a verb and often more -- much more. Utterances don't have to be sentences, of course. "Fuck you." makes perfect sense, but it lacks a subject. Same for "Shit" - which is an ejaculation (saying "amen" in church is an 'ejaculation').
Cool. Looks good. But is this an observation, so that it just so happens that all sentences have a subject; or is it a definition, as in, if it doesn't have a subject, it's not a sentence?
Actually, that's an interesting case. "Fuck" in "Fuck you," looks like a lot a verb in the imperative, where people usually posit an understood subject, "you". However, if that were the case, we'd be expecting "Fuck yourslef," as in "Buy yourself a drink."
I still think it's a normal sentence whose verb is in the imperative mood. I'm not sure what to do about the "you", though. It looks like an object, but if it were I'd expect a reflexive pronoun.
When it comes to "It's raining," I prefer the "dummy subject" interpretation: "It" is all syntax and no reference. The verb carries all the referential meaning in the text.
Neat. Any background on this? Other examples?
You'd have to be trolling to respond to my post that way. What did I say the subject was?
No. But this one does.
So along with some others here I suspect it's not a philosophical issue.
EDIT: Just noticed that Dawnstorm made the same point.
Consider also the sentence "It is raining cats and dogs" with "cats and dogs" being the direct object, although really the direct object isn't an object at all because there are literally no cats and dogs falling from the sky. "Cats and dogs" in the sentence means "heavily" and describes how it is raining, making the objects (cats and dogs) actually an adverb (It is raining heavily). The fact that "it" in "it is raining" has no clear referent is as irrelevant as "cats and dogs" not actually referring to cats and dogs in the sentence "it is raining cats and dogs."
Choice B, in order to be a sentence, it must have a subject by definition, but a fully formed thought need not have an explicit subject, as in @jamalrob's statement above where he said "fascinating." What's the subject of that statement? It is a fully formed thought with a clear meaning though.
Also, note that the word "fascinating" doesn't even mean fascinating in the sarcastic way he used it. I think what it really means here that it's not really all that fascinating.
Btw, the broad definition of a sentence includes "minor sentences" such as "Oh!" etc. You don't need a subject:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/minor%20sentence
And, yes, this isn't philosophy as far as I can see, so moved to Questions category.
There's always one... :sad:
I haven’t read the answer from Hanover, although by the looks of it I should.
‘Is’ is a ‘to be’ verb right? and if taken to mean ‘to
be’ in this sentence then in it can’t be the subject.
I wonder if we can make a case for IS by another route, will attempt later.
So we have a choice between IT and RAINING.
I might be wrong but in indo-European languages normal word order would have subject before object.
IT could denote anything so we could call it the universe and this would be indicative of the subject right?
RAINING is a straight up adjective right?
Present active - that relevant or even correct?
IT can be a pronoun so we can absolutely make IT the subject.
IS- although unlikely....
A hypothetical conversation.
Man 1: what is it?
Man 2: It IS. * feels the drops of rain on his head, looks up and sighing states “Raining, while leaving no gap in conversation to indicate any hesistation etc.
If ‘it’ IS. Then is IT an adjective and IS the subject?while RAINING is just extraneous information?
Am I correct with that line of thinking?
Incorrect?
Misleading?
Outside of context?
Just plain dumb.
However stupid that answer may be the other question of is this philosophy then I think it is. I think philosophy is the pursuit of truth and beauty, language and linguistics is certainly a treasure trove of truth and beauty.
Philosophy is weird when it does stuff that amounts to "trying to figure out stuff that kindergartners know (via pretending that there's something inscrutable about it.)" Sometimes it almost seems like folks must simply be bored--or desperately trying to find a novel dissertation topic--so enter strained-puzzle-creation mode about mundane shit.
It is obvious that you're wrong that the "it" in "It is raining" behaves like any other subject pronoun (or that all pronouns behave the same way).
Now take the first "it" in the sentence above and try replacing it with a noun phrase to find out why.
The meteorological conditions outside is raining.
That doesn't seem right.
:up:
Simple but important expression and interpretation occurred long before humans developed language, grammar, and philosophy.
That's because it's wrong. @Terrapin Station seems to be confusing the main and auxiliary uses of the verb "to be". Aux use gives sub+aux verb+action verb (present continuous) as in "He is running". Main use can give attributive or identifying relations (with adjective or noun on right side respectively). Identifying relation illustrated by the sentence: "The meteorological condition is rain" is closest to the nonsense sentence he provided.
I don't know where to start because every sentence in your comment has multiple problems and I don't want to write a thousand word reply.
Let's just start with this: what is the "nonsense sentence" I'm providing?
Maybe that's what Baden was referring to. Why would you just be substituting the one phrase for the pronoun like that, like you're a robot?
First off, it behaves that way just in case someone thinks about it in that way, right?
Re "It" in your sentence, it can simply stand for "The conventions are such that," "The facts" (if you believe such things are facts), etc.--it just depends on how you think about it.
That bluff won't work because I know what I'm talking about.
Substitute the noun you think is appropriate for the pronoun in the sentence I provided and the original one. It should be easy under your analysis.
I'll do thousands of words back and forth with you picking all of that apart, but one at a time. (The first part, in order, would be the thousands of words we'll get into re the idea that one can be wrong about this stuff.)
As I asked Michael, why would you just be doing a simple substitution,as if that's what I was suggesting, as if you're a robot?
Are we asking for the answer for robots? (Maybe because the goal is AI programming or something?)
Yes, it's not simple. That's the point I was making.
See, for example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_pronoun
It's not a kindergartener issue. It's a serious linguistic issue.
The first big problem in that description is that what it is for something to have meaning is for an individual to mentally assign a meaning to the item in question.
If you want a simple replacement for something like "It is obvious that the violence will continue," you can just say something like "The facts are obvious that the violence will continue."
You have to change "is" to "are," obviously, in order to follow grammatical conventions re singular/plural.
Likewise you could say something like "The meteorological condition outside is rain." We just need to modify the forms of words we're using a bit to match conventions, if you are concerned with actual substitution for some reason. (And non-robots should not need to have this explained to them.)
I wouldn't say something a la "Every word must have a meaning" or "Every occurrence of 'it' must have a meaning" or anything like that, by the way--obviously not if my view is that the meaning of any x is determined simply by an individual assigning whatever meaning they do (or do not). So also, any particular occurrence of 'it' doesn't necessarily have any particular meaning, either. As I said in my first post in this thread: "(Well, or i should clarify 'What I'd normally take the subject to be in lieu of other information' . . . I dont want to suggest objectivist semantics.) "
As I said, you are confusing the present continuous tense with the present tense and auxiliary and main forms of the verb 'is'. 'It is rain' is not the same kind of sentence as "It is raining". At all. That's basic grammar. And we are discussing the latter not the former. So, yes, you can make the issue disappear by changing words so we're no longer talking about what we were taking about. But so what?
It would strike me that the only serious linguistic issue would be one where a speaker could not convey his thoughts due to formal rules in place, yet that never seems to occur. In fact, I'd think that the speakers would just modify the rules so they could say what they wanted to.
The thought conveyed with "it is raining" is that rain is descending from the sky above There is likely some historical reason we use "it" to refer vaguely to the generalized state of being in the world around us, but why might this matter? When I take a shower in the morning, I don't wonder where I might take it. That's just how you say it. And if you tell someone that you are going to now engage in showering, you're communicating two things: you are going to take a shower and you're not a native English speaker.
This is irrelevant and in no way compensates for a basic lack of knowledge of grammar.
What I wanted to convey was that it's a matter of linguistic debate and analysis and there is a 'there' there in that context. There's no practical or philosophical 'there' there though that I see.
Quoting Hanover
But you don't.
Is "It is rain" the same as "The meteorological condition outside is rain"?
What I feel you're doing is entering strained-puzzle-creation mode about mundane shit.
I guess you mean "It is rain". In which case insofar as rain is a type of meteorological condition, you can do the substitution (minus the adverb).
It (pronoun substituting for noun phrase, "The meteorological condition")
is (main verb "to be" [relationship: identifying])
rain (noun phrase).
You could also use "This wet stuff" or whatever. An analogous sentence would be "It is a cat", "It" could be a substitution for "The animal" as in "The animal is a cat". No problem here.
But these are completely different sentences grammatically to the original, so I don't see the relevance.
If anyone cares what you feel maybe they can write me a PM explaining why because on that I'm stumped.
So, you'd say that "It is snow" is the same as "It is rain" because we could make a substitution in either case and you'd analyze it the same grammatically? That's what you took me to be asking you?
Sure, and if you don't care you can keep responding to me. That would be a good way to show that you don't care/you're not interested.
If I had a dollar for every time you said that to someone... Carry on then. I'll leave you to it.
That bluff won't work because I know what I'm talking about.
That’s what we usually do. “It is hot” becomes “the kettle is hot”. “He is running” becomes “John is running”.
What can we substitute in for “it” in “it is raining”? Apparently not “the meteorological conditions”.
As I explained above, "The meteorological condition outside is rain"--it doesn't have the same exact grammatical form as "It is raining," but that's simply because of linguistic conventions. Semantically, to many people, it's the same. If we're just talking about grammatical conventions qua grammatical conventions, for their own sake, and we're not at all talking about semantics, etc., why are we doing that? (Not to mention that we can't really talk about grammatical conventions for their own sake while avoiding semantics, anyway--we have to involve semantics to talk about anything really)
I could see focusing on grammar for its own sake in that way if we were trying to program some AI or something maybe--that might be useful in that context.
As soon as you ask "What does 'it' refer to" you're doing semantics. Semantically, "It" is "the meteorological conditions outside." What does the sentence tell us about the meteorological conditions outside? That there's liquid precipitation at the moment, of course.
Semantically, most people would say that "It is raining" is the same as "Il pleut." "It is raining" is not grammatically the same as "Il pleut" however.
Semantically, there is no subject.
The subject is not the rain, because 'the rain is raining' makes no sense. Likewise for pretty much anything you put in place of 'it.'
Notice also that the question 'is it raining?' makes sense, but the question 'what is raining?' does not.
In languages, unlike English, where an overt syntactic subject is not obligatory, you often cannot put a subject before meteorological verbs like 'rain.'
"It" references a generalized state of being, making no specific reference to outside or the meteorological conditions because your sentence has no context. In the paragraph: "I got a new job selling cars and I'm making all sorts of money. It's not just drizzling a little money here and there on the showroom floor. It's raining," "it" doesn't reference the meteorological conditions and "rain" doesn't even reference cloud precipitation.
Yes.
Quoting Terrapin Station
Yes.
Quoting Terrapin Station
That's the tricky part. It is not a given that "it" is referential in the first place. One possible answer to "What does "it" refer to," is nothing, and for most (but not all) linguists that's the answer.
One question we can ask about subjects (as arguments of verbs) is what the participant role of the subject is in relation to the verb. Is it an agent as in "I go to school," where going is an action the speaker undertakes? Is it an experiencer, as in "I'm dying," where the speaker is experiencing death?
What is the relation between the verb and it's primary argument?
My take on this topic is that any attempt at answering these questions is post hoc; the meaning is emergent rather than referential. "It" is referentially empty and has no semantic function until you enter the meta level and ask what sort of function it might have.
I also don't see any reason to ask these questions. Syntactic relations are enough. I do realise that it's not a clear cut issue. Take a potential exchange:
A: "It's raining."
B: "No, it's not; it's snowing."
There are three "its" in this exchange, and if I speak carelessly, I'd say that all three its refer to the same thing. Except it's a dummy it and refers to nothing, so how can it have the same reference? This is a problem, so at the very least your position is valid, if not even right.
Consider this sentence:
"It's true that it's raining."
Two its, both dummy its, but clearly not "referring" to the same thing in the way the three its in the previous examples do.
This is a situation where I see problems on either side, but my personal priorities find the problems with a generalised referent to be more severe.
To summarise, I think the meaning of "it" arises out of the interection of grammar with the semantics of the verb and is thus vague and general. It's not referential; but it has some sort of substance, such that you can differentiate between different sorts of dummy-its. What that semantic substance is like is a problem I'm not sure how to address, but it's not a problem severe enough for me to abandon the dummy-it interpretation.
Does this make sense?
(To make matters worse, we shouldn't be confusing subject-predicate of philosophical propositions with subject-predicate of a sentence structure. It's harder than it should be.)
I had taken sentence as a grammatically correct concatenation of words. Now you say there is more to it.
"It" is a pronoun, an indexical.
Again, on my view, re semantics, terms mean, terms refer to whatever individuals consider them to mean/refer to. In other words, meaning is subjective. Contra Putnam, it is "just in the head."
I don't think so. It's the "it is raining" that is seen and assessed, not the "it" in isolation.
The phrase "It is raining" is a semantically equivalent unit to "rain is falling" (or something along those lines).
So you didn't look at "it" in isolation in "it is raining" or you could sensibly say "I looked at it, and it is raining". As if you could also look at an "it" that wasn't raining. You looked and saw rain was falling. You looked at a state of affairs illustrated by a phrase that is a semantic whole grammatically inclusive of a dummy pronoun.
[Edit: Cross-posted with comment above]
What about commands like "clean the dishes" (verb and object but no subject) or "go away" (verb but no subject or object)? Are they not sentences?
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella.”[/quote]
So here we have the authoritative explanation that it is the rain that rains. And should you be so foolish as to enquire whether the rain raineth cats and dogs, stair-rods, or some other species, I can reassure you that such is just flowery talk and the reality is that The rain rains a rain of rain.
And since you question my own authority, O impetuous ones, I will declare that I live in Wales, and that must surely settle the matter at once and for all.
:razz:
Don't question @Hanover. He went to grammar school after all. Semper paratus. :smile:
I agree with this. But meaning in praxis, i.e. when you use "it" in "it is raining," is not quite the same as the meaning you assign in analysis. The latter can be adequate to the former or not. In other words, agreeing on what "It is raining," means is a lot easier than agreeing on the proper analysis of the component "it".
So maybe you refer to something when you say "it" in "It is raining," and I don't; but this difference (should it exist) causes precious little problems for successful communication should either of us say that sentence.
Beyond that, I'm not sure why you say that pronouns are indexical, if you think it's all in the head. I'll come out and say it: when I say "it" in "It is raining," I have no referent in mind. None whatsoever. When I say to you, "It's black with pink spots," you probably have no idea what I'm referring to. "It" is indexical, and you're not privy to the context (disclosure: there is no context - I made up a random sentence). When I say to you "It is raining," you probably have a good idea what I'm talking about, because all the information you need is in "is raining". Here "it" is not indexical; it's referentially empty and only fills a function. Please explain the difference in opaqueness of the sentences, if "it" is indexical in both sentences.
If "it" were indexical in "It is raining," it would have a different meaning whenever you use the sentence, and I'd have to parse "it" first before I can understand the sentence, like in "It is black with pink spots." In fact, the general indexicality of pronouns is fairly good argument against the fact "it" in "it is raining," or "it is five o'clock", or similar sentences is referential. If it were, we couldn't fully understand the sentences until we figure out what "it" means (because the meaning of "it" would depend on the context of speaking).
1. used to refer to a thing previously mentioned or easily identified.
"a room with two beds in it"
referring to an animal or child of unspecified sex.
"she was holding the baby, cradling it and smiling into its face"
referring to a fact or situation previously mentioned, known, or happening.
"stop it, you're hurting me"
2. used to identify a person.
"it's me"
3. used in the normal subject position in statements about time, distance, or weather.
"it's half past five"
4. used in the normal subject or object position when a more specific subject or object is given later in the sentence.
"it is impossible to assess the problem"
5. used to emphasize a following part of a sentence.
"it is the child who is the victim"
6. the situation or circumstances; things in general.
"no one can stay here—it's too dangerous now"
7. exactly what is needed or desired.
"they thought they were it"
8. INFORMAL
sex appeal.
"he's still got “it.”"
sexual intercourse.
9. INFORMAL
denoting a person or thing that is exceptionally fashionable, popular, or successful at a particular time.
"they were Hollywood's It couple"
10. (in children's games) the player who has to catch the others.
it (pron.)
Old English hit, neuter nominative and accusative of third person singular pronoun, from Proto-Germanic demonstrative base *khi- (source also of Old Frisian hit, Dutch het, Gothic hita "it"), from PIE *ko- "this" (see he). Used in place of any neuter noun, hence, as gender faded in Middle English, it took on the meaning "thing or animal spoken about before."
The h- was lost due to being in an unemphasized position, as in modern speech the h- in "give it to him," "ask her," is heard only "in the careful speech of the partially educated" [Weekley]. It "the sex act" is from 1610s; meaning "sex appeal (especially in a woman)" first attested 1904 in works of Rudyard Kipling, popularized 1927 as title of a book by Elinor Glyn, and by application of It Girl to silent-film star Clara Bow (1905-1965). In children's games, the meaning "the one who must tag or catch the others" is attested from 1842.
From Old English as nominative of an impersonal verb or statement when the thing for which it stands is implied (it rains, it pleases me). After an intransitive verb, used transitively for the action denoted, from 1540s (originally in fight it out). That's it "there is no more" is from 1966; this is it "the anticipated or dreaded moment has arrived" is from 1942.
"It" from above, 3. used in the normal subject position in statements about time, distance, or weather.
"it's half past five" or 5. used to emphasize a following part of a sentence.
Quoting Terrapin Station
This makes me nervous. But it has good literary ancestry:
“I don't know what you mean by 'glory,'?" Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'?"
"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all.”
? Lewis Carroll
Yes, in those cases I say it's referentially empty and only fills a syntactic function. (Also in 2., 4., and 6., for what it's worth).
"It" is indexical because the meaning depends on the context. "It" doesn't have a "fixed" meaning like "cat," say. Like all indexicals, the reference of the term can be completely different in different contexts, they function more like variables.
I know that. But you don't need any context to parse "It is raining," correctly: "it" doesn't behave like the usual indexical "it" in this sentence.
It does if you think about it that way.
What way? I don't understand.
What way? As an indexical. That's what we're talking about.
But if "It" in "It's raining," were indexical, then you couldn't be arguing that "it" refers to the weather or anything, because you couldn't tell what it was referring to until you had a context.
If I say, "He's a carpenter," then you know that someone's a carpenter, but you don't know who, if you lack context. How does "It's raining," remotely behave like that? That's what I don't understand.
As I said (in my first post in this thread), ""What I'd normally take the subject to be in lieu of other information" In other words, I'm guessing the context based on the situation in which that sentence typically occurs.
If you have enough information to parse an expression without actual context, it's not indexical, though.
Again, I'm guessing the context. It's context-dependent.
A: What's the weather doing?
B: It's raining.
So 'it' refers to the weather.
BTW, this is the funniest thread I've ever read in a philosophy forum. Thanks to everyone for making me laugh.
We're talking past each other.
A: What's the bumble bee doing?
B: It's raining.
So "it" refers to the bumble bee.
The conversation makes no sense, but the syntactic connection is sound. In your conversation "it" refers to the weather; in mine to the bumble bee. But it's a question of syntax, not semantics.
Does it matter that your conversation makes sense and mine doesn't, for determining reference?
Quoting Dawnstorm
There are two possible readings of your "B: It's raining.", as follows:
1. 'It' refers to the bumble bee. In this case, since a bumble bee can't rain, the speaker is uttering nonsense.
2. (much more likely in real life) 'It' refers to the weather, and B is not answering A at all.
So semantics matters. You can't simply assume that in 'it's raining', 'it' refers to the subject of the most recent sentence uttered. As Terrapin Station has said, 'it' is indexical, and in any sentence about the weather, suich as 'it is raining' or 'it is sunny', 'it' refers to the weather.
I could say the same thing about your example. Maybe B didn't hear what A was saying, and is just commenting about the weather, the connection being a co-incidence.
Your example proves nothing, because you're basing the proof on the same imputed connection that I did in this example. But if the connection is there, you have anaphoric it and not dummy it. It's not the same situation.
A: What's the weather doing?
B: It's raining.
Assumption 1: B responds to A. Anaphoric it.
Assumption 2: B ignores A, and is randomly commenting on the weather. Dummy it.
Two different situations. It's just more obvious with the bumble bee example.
You can err on any utterance; but that's a question for pragmatics or conversation analysis rather than either syntax or semantics.
Yeah, context matters. But it matters on more than one level, and you have to be careful not to mix them up.
You're mixing up your forms like Terrapin did.
The "it" in "it is raining" cannot syntactically refer to the weather in the trivial way the "it" does in "it is sunny" because the syntax differs. This is made obvious when you consider that "a sunny day" is a correct form but "a raining day" isn't. The day can be "sunny" but the day cannot be "raining". Rather, it can be rainy.
So, the proper syntactical parallels are:
It (regular pronoun indexing the weather) is sunny (adjective). ?
It (regular pronoun indexing the weather) is rainy (adjective). ?
and
It (dummy pronoun with no clear referent) is raining (present participle). ?
It (dummy pronoun with no clear referent) is sunning (present participle). X*
*But we can say "She is sunning herself" meaning sunbathing. The reflexive version seems to have stolen the opportunity for a non-reflexive parallel to "It is raining". So, why the difference? Maybe because of the different characteristics of each phenomena (we lie in the sun not in the rain and the rain falling seems more active and verb-like than the emission of less tangible light rays) or maybe because of some etymological accident. Fact remains, the former is valid and the latter isn't, and the most straightforward and commonly accepted logical analysis of the former is the non-indexical dummy pronoun angle, the objections given in this discussion so far having being based on misunderstandings.
Alternatively, in Latin for example, the verb is "pluit" where the subject is marked by the conjugational ending. In language like that, there isn't even a way to ask what the syntactic subject refers to because it is built into the verb itself. It would not raise any more question than the statement "currit" meaning "he/she/it runs". It might invite the question "quis currit?" - "who runs?" - but the sentence as it stand nevertheless conveys meaning. If analogously one were to ask "quid pluit?" - "what rains?", I suppose the answer would be "pluvia pluit" - "the rain rains". That seems like a plausible enough answer in the case of English as well: the "it" just refers to the intransitive (NOT reflexive) activity of the rain itself.
You could also just treat the whole sentence "it is raining" as paraphrase for a sentence with identical meaning where the subject is explicit and unproblematic. For example, it would be shorthand for the semantically equivalent "rain is failing", "rain is happening now" or whatever. There's no point in asking about the meaning of "it" in isolation because it has none independently of its functional role in the sentence as a whole. And what that sentence means is given by whatever truth conditions make it true or false. Those truth conditions, in turn, don't depend on whatever form we choose to express those conditions in within a language, making it arbitrary to prefer one form, e.g. "it's raining", to another, e.g. "rain falls".
In the exchange Herg provided (What's the weather doing?/It's raining.) it can. People may consider it awkward, but "it is raining," as an analogue to "the weather is raining," as a reply to "what is the weather doing?" is plausible (but not necessary; it's ultimately an empirical question - I do agree with Terrapin Station that it's all in the head).
The conversation says nothing about dummy it, though, other than in the case of a plausible antecedant for "it" a sentence might be ambiguous between dummy it and anaphoric it.
But you have changed 'weather' to 'day' here, and so you're attacking a straw man.
Quoting Baden
To me this seems rather less straightforward than the view that "it" in "it is raining" refers to something. I suggest that what has actually happened here is that what it refers to (the weather) is no longer overtly mentioned because it is almost always the weather, and nothing else, that is raining, and so there's usually no need to mention the weather explicitly.
Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rain) offers three definitions of 'rain' as an intransitive verb:
"1 : to send down rain
2 : to fall as water in drops from the clouds
3 : to fall like rain"
In the exchange I offered, because "it is raining" is given as an answer to the question "what's the weather doing?", the appropriate definition is 1, i.e:
A: What's the weather doing?
B: It's raining (= sending down rain).
It is also possible to have this exchange:
A: What's the rain doing?
B: It's raining.
B has uttered a trivial truth. A may be annoyed with B for uttering it, but then A has only himself to blame for asking such a silly question (what would the rain be doing, after all?). In this exchange, the relevant definition of 'rain' from Merriam-Webster is 2, i.e.;
A: What's the rain doing?
B: It's raining (= falling as water in drops from the clouds).
This is also the sense of the verb in unenlightened's quoted verse by Charles Bowen ("The rain it raineth on the just") and also, incidentally, by Shakespeare, in the Fool's song from 'Twelfth Night' ("For the rain it raineth every day").
Usually when someone says "it is raining", they intend to be informative, and not merely utter a trivial truth. What they intend to inform us about is the weather, so I think it is reasonable to conclude that the "it" in "it is raining" usually refers to the weather, and that the relevant definition of the verb is Merriam-Webster's 1.
Sunny day, rainy day. Sunny weather, rainy weather. Get it now?
Never heard that one. Although "what's the weather doing" was new to me too and that apparently is a thing, so food for thought.
Quoting Herg
Love Shakespeare's use of language. "But me no buts" is one of my favourites.
Or as @Banno might say, silliness sillying. Unless you're a grammar nerd like me.
Strange weather days.
Syntax by itself doesn't refer. And reference is semantics. Reference requires thinking. What refers, and the way it refers, is purely a matter of how an individual thinks about it.
Which of course means, "I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to myself."
Communication doesn't hinge on syntax referring or on reference being something non-mental.
Which of course means, "I'm not talking to you, I'm talking to myself."
Aren't we not supposed to be trolling on this board?
Which means, "I can't even deny it according to my own theory."