It is raining somewhere

Suppose that a person says, ‘It is raining,’ but does not specify where. You might think that the correct way to interpret them is as saying that it is raining in the local area where they are. Francois Reҫanati provides an example of a context in which this is not true (2002: 317).

Imagine a situation in which rain has become very rare all over the earth. Rain detectors have been placed in many locations and they feed information to a monitoring room. When it is raining, a bell rings in the monitoring room. Imagine that the bell rings and a weatherman on duty shouts, ‘It is raining!’ But he does not mean that it is raining in the local area where he is. He means it is raining somewhere, whether that somewhere is the local area or not.

Reference

Reҫanati, F. 2002. Unarticulated constituents. Linguistics and Philosophy 25: 299-345.

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