Tradition holds that weather verbs like rain are zero-valent and take an expletive subject (the 'weather-it'). I argue,
however, that the weather-it is a semantic argument of the verb and denotes a type of abstract force. I show that data from
control verbs provide strong support for this claim and that current expletive tests fail to yield convincing evidence to the
contrary. Ultimately, this analysis removes the motivation for a class of atransitive verbs in English, a desirable
consequence for theories of event structure which assume that all predicates have at least one semantic
argument.
