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UbuEng Posted 9 years ago
Grammar

What is the structure: 'It is snowing.'

What is the best way to view the parts of speech in the following sentence:

It is snowing.

Here's how I'm leaning: Subject noun + link verb (copula) + present participle adjective

It is the situational subject, a pronoun that has the general situation as a referent.

The verb is be. It is not the present continuous is snowing because the subject (the situation) lacks agency - the situation can't snow. However, we could have a sentence like, 'It snows a lot in Moscow,' where in this tense the only option is that snow is a verb.

Snowing could be a gerund complement but I think it is functioning more like an adjective that describes the situation. The argument for snowing being a gerund is that it could be seen as the action the situation is, but snowing is just an aspect of the general situation not the whole of it, so it cannot be just snowing. Hence the argument that the sentence is inherently descriptive of an aspect of the situation and snowing must be an adjective.

This maybe a situation where usage has simply trumped grammar and there really is no definitive solution to understanding this structure grammatically.

Maybe it would be simpler if we all spoke like Yoda, 'Snowing, it is".

  

Top answer

ubuEng It is snowing It's the present continuous. We use it as a meaningless subject with expressions that refer to time, weather, temperature or distances.

— SpeedyG

  • ubuEng It is snowing It's the present continuous.
  • We use it as a meaningless subject with expressions that refer to time, weather, temperature or distances.
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2 Answers
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ubuEngIt is snowing
It's the present continuous. We use it as a meaningless subject with expressions that refer to time, weather, temperature or distances.
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