Is there, like, a word for what it is doing in English constructions like "it's raining" or "it's hot"?
Normally it is a pronoun which stands in for a noun that has been previously referred to, or is obvious from context. But what is it standing in for in these sentences?
In English, "raining" is a verb that actually does not take a subject. Sort of like the opposite of an intransitive verb. It can rain frogs. It can rain blood. But nothing can rain.
Like, replace It with any conceivable word that might be being referred to in the sentence "It's raining." None of those replacements will be correct.
Is there a linguistic term for this phenomenon of an "empty" pronoun being used to stand in for the lack of a subject?
Also, is there any established term for a verb that takes no subject? The closest I can think of is ergative but I'm not sure that's quite accurate.
"it" is a dummy pronoun, and "raining" in this context is an impersonal verb
a sort of similar thing is hay in spanish, which translates as "there is" or "there are"
example sentence: "Hay lluvia." (There is rain.)
From what I can tell, it's a special third person usage of the verb "to have" that doesn't specify any subject that does the actual having. There's no dummy pronoun, unlike English, but in general Spanish is a pro-drop and null-subject language that allows the pronoun to be omitted if including it wouldn't add anything to the meaning.
example sentence: "Llueve." (It's raining.)
