Meteorological constructions in Latin: argument realization and types of event

This paper addresses the question of the alternation between impersonal and personal constructions with weather verbs in Latin, and shows that the two morphosyntactic strategies are not equally manifested by meteorological predicates; rather, their distribution is related to differences in the event structures of verbs. Latin precipitation verbs, such as pluit, nivit/ning(u)it, grandinat, correspond to the prototype of the semantically atransitive category and, therefore, select the syntactically atransitive construction; whereas electrostatic and daylight phenomenon verbs, such as tonat, lucet, fulminat, fulgurat, etc. are amenable to being conceptualized as emission verbs and, therefore, are more likely to occur in a personal construction in which the source of the emission is expressed as the subject, independently of its divine/non-divine nature.