Making a distinction where a distinction doesn’t exist

Can you discern a difference in meaning between

It's stopped raining.

and

The rain has stopped.

I couldn’t.

In Chinese apparently, there is such a distinction depending on the order of the 2 words, 雨, ‘rain’ and 下, ‘down.’

*Falling rain* means
*It's raining*

and

*Rain falling* can mean
*The drought has broken*

How can we leverage this to find a difference in meaning in the 2 different ways to describe rain stopping, and as a further objective, help people whose native languages don’t have in/definite articles learn how to use ‘a’ and ‘the’?

Imagine a telephone conversation between someone at school where it has just stopped raining, so they’re going to go home and someone at home, where it has not been raining, and it has not appeared likely to rain.

A: It's stopped raining. I'm 
coming home.
B: It's raining there?

versus

A: The rain has stopped. I'm 
coming home.
B: What rain? It's not raining 
here.

Switching around B’s response produces an anomalous conversation.

A: It's stopped raining. I'm 
coming home.
B: What rain? It's not raining 
here.

A: Well, it is, or WAS, raining
here.

versus

A: The rain has stopped. I'm 
coming home.
B: It's raining there?

A: Yeh. It was. It didn't rain
there?

The first switch seems more anomalous that the second.

Putting ‘the rain’ in the topic position at the start of the sentence, like in Chinese, shows the speaker assumes the rain is shared knowledge. When the listener says ‘what rain?’, the speaker should understand their assumption is not shared.

There are restrictions on nouns without definite articles taking the topic position.

Rather than

Rain is going to fall.

It's going to rain.

But, A hard rain’s gonna fall

And A horse walks into a police station But see in the body of the story, “the horse that walked into the police station.”

Read ArticleRole and TheDefaultReferenceOfThe

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