1. Definition of Antecedent. In grammar, an antecedent is a noun, noun phrase, or clause to which an anaphor refers in a coreference.For example, in the passage "I did not see John because he wasn't there", "John" is the antecedent of the anaphor "he"; together "John" and "he" are called a coreference because they both refer to the same thing (in this case, a particular person). A pronoun refers to the participants in a phrase, for example: I and me are first-person pronouns. Some proforms lack a linguistic antecedent (or postcedent). Proforms usually follow their antecedents, but sometimes they precede them, in which case one is, technically, dealing with postcedents instead of antecedents. Grammar A word, phrase, clause, or sentence to which another word (especially a following relative pronoun) refers. Grammar. Also known as a referent . Rule: A singular pronoun must replace a singular noun; a plural pronoun must replace a plural noun. In such cases, scholars have recommended to rewrite the sentence structure to be more specific,[3] or repeat the words of the antecedent rather than use only a pronoun phrase, as a technique to resolve the uncertain antecedent. A particularly frequent type of proform occurs in relative clauses. SL. [1] A proform takes its meaning from its antecedent; e.g., "John arrived late because traffic held him up." Here are a few things to remember, Antecedents and pronouns are invariably linked. They are made up of at least one verb and a subject. And there should be a clear indication of that noun to which the pronoun would be referring to. Google Classroom Facebook Twitter Pronouns and Antecedents Pronouns are words that help us avoid being really repetitive in our writing. 2 a : a preceding event, condition, or cause events that were antecedents of the war. For example, in the sentence 'John knows Tim and likes him,' Tim is the antecedent of him. someone or something existing or happening before, especially as the cause or origin of something existing or happening later: Charles Babbage's mechanical calculating engines … That word is technically called a proform, and while English allows for types of antecedents based on many parts of … Pronouns need antecedents. Antecedent is one such term. More broadly, an antecedent may be any word in a sentence (or in a sequence of sentences) that another word or phrase refers to. This noun is called the antecedent. The prefix ante- means "before" or "in front of", and post- means "after" or "behind". Most commonly, an antecedent has a personal pronoun, as it does in the previous example (her), a … When a pronoun is used in a sentence, it must have a corresponding noun at the beginning before it was used.

In such cases, scholars have recommended to rewrite the sentence structure to be more … An antecedent is the thing represented by a pronoun. The following examples illustrate a range of proforms and their antecedents. noun. When you use a pronoun, it’s standing in for a word you used previously—that’s the antecedent. BEFORE. An antecedent is “the thing that came before”. Pleonastic proforms also lack a linguistic antecedent, e.g. Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks. The word antecedent is derived from Latin, which means “to go before” and its name is also derived from the idea that a pronoun refers to something that has been previously mentioned in the sentence. A clause is made up of words or phrases. The definition of antecedent is something that happened before. It helps to break down the parts of this definition.

In grammar vocabulary, the antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause that a pronoun can replace. Almost any syntactic category can serve as the antecedent to a proform. The term antecedent stems from traditional grammar. (Entry 1 of 2) 1 grammar : a substantive word, phrase, or clause whose denotation is referred to by a pronoun that typically follows the substantive (such as John in "Mary saw John and called to him") broadly : a word or phrase replaced by a substitute. (ante = "before") The pronoun must agree with its antecedent in number. This complex-sounding definition is actually quite simple. [3] An antecedent is the word or words that a pronoun refers to. In some cases, the wording could have an uncertain antecedent, where the antecedent of a pronoun is not clear because two or more prior nouns or phrases could match the count, gender or logic as a prior reference. Antecedent Definition. It is raining, where the pronoun it is semantically empty and cannot be viewed as referring to anything specific in the discourse world. 0. In grammar vocabulary, the antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause that a pronoun can replace. They will get you for that, and therefore cannot be construed as taking a linguistic antecedent. From the Cambridge English Corpus ^ Definitions of "antecedent" along these lines can be found, for instance, in Crystal (1999:20) and Radford (2004:322) In Latin, where the word is derived from, the word antecedent means to go before.It was given its name with the idea that a pronoun refers to something previously mentioned in the sentence. Antecedents are sometimes called pronoun antecedents. Definition of antecedent. Antecedent definition, preceding; prior: an antecedent event. Learn more about pronoun-antecedent agreement. Antecedent definition: An antecedent of something happened or existed before it and was similar to it in some... | Meaning, pronunciation, translations and examples Dictionary ! Definition of Antecedent (grammar) In grammar, an antecedent is an expression (word, phrase, clause, etc.) Many relative clauses contain a relative pronoun, and these relative pronouns have an antecedent. Antecedent is an earlier clause, phrase, or word to which a pronoun, noun, or another word refers.Broadly speaking, antecedent is a literary device in which a word or pronoun in a line or sentence refers to an earlier word. HOT GRAMMAR TIP. The antecedent of a pronoun is usually a noun. President Lincoln is the ANTECEDENT for the pronoun his. The proforms are in bold, and their antecedents are underlined. The following examples illustrate postcedents: Postcedents are rare compared to antecedents, and in practice, the distinction between antecedents and postcedents is often ignored, the term antecedent being used to denote both. In such cases, the antecedent is implied in the given discourse environment or from general knowledge of the world. True, a pronoun looks backward to its antecedent, but it can also look ahead to a referent placed later in the sentence. Thus when a proform precedes its antecedent, the antecedent is technically not an antecedent, but rather it is a postcedent, post- meaning 'after, behind'. In English grammar, an antecedent is the noun or noun phrase that a pronoun refers to. Then match the antecedent with a pronoun that is consistent in number. See more. The pronoun him refers to and takes its meaning from John, so John is the antecedent of him. Antecedents and Personal Pronouns. For example, in the sentence "Bill ate the pizza … This particular noun which is referred by the pronoun that comes later is known as the antecedent of that pronoun. ‘Plural pronouns with nominally singular antecedents like ‘everyone’ have been a major battlefield in the grammar wars.’ antecedent. 0. For example, if the pronoun is singular, the antecedent should also be singular. In the sentence ``People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones,'' people is the antecedent of who 3 (Logic) the hypothetical clause, usually introduced by ``if'', in a conditional statement: that which implies the other Also known as a referent. What is an Antecedent? For instance, the first person pronouns I, me, we, and us and second person pronoun you are proforms that usually lack a linguistic antecedent. Despite the implications of the term (Latin ante- means "before"), "an antecedent can follow rather than precede [the pronoun]: 'For his first Pacific voyage, Cook had no chronometer'" (Concise Oxford Companion to the English Language, 2005).See Examples and Observations below. To improve, the sentence could be reworded as: "Inside the box, there was a doll which was made of clay" or, "Inside the box, there was a doll made of clay" or, "There was a girl doll inside the box, and she was made of clay" (or similar wording). Join us as we demonstrate how to make sure that your pronouns and antecedents match up with one another: that’s called agreement! Theories of syntax explore the distinction between antecedents and postcedents in terms of binding. Definition: An antecedent is a word, phrase or clause that determines what a pronoun that follows refers to. When a pronoun refers back to a noun earlier in the sentence, that noun is called an antecedent. An antecedent is defined as a noun or pronoun to which another noun or pronoun is referring to and it usually goes before the pronoun. The ante- in antecedent means 'before, in front of'. In grammar vocabulary, the antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause that a pronoun can replace. In grammar, an antecedent is an expression (word, phrase, clause, sentence, etc.) 1. The word "antecedent" begins … 1 an event, circumstance, etc., that happens before another 2 (Grammar) a word or phrase to which a pronoun refers. From the Cambridge English Corpus By the same token, different effects imply different causal antecedents. But it doesn’t. an event, organization, or thing that is similar to the one you have mentioned but existed earlier historical antecedents 2 → antecedents 3. Also see: In the following sentences, certain pronouns are in bold print, and the antecedents of those pronouns are in italics.

In such cases, the antecedent is implied in the given discourse environment or from general knowledge of the world. One's ancestors. While the stereotypical proform is a pronoun and the stereotypical antecedent a noun or noun phrase, these examples demonstrate that most any syntactic category can in fact serve as an antecedent to a proform, whereby the proforms themselves are a diverse bunch. noun. ‘Plural pronouns with nominally singular antecedents like ‘everyone’ have been a major battlefield in the grammar wars.’ More example sentences ‘Because they are free of antecedents, such clauses are sometimes called independent or free relative clauses.’ the antecedents are not constituents. [2] The last two examples are particularly interesting, because they show that some proforms can even take discontinuous word combinations as antecedents, i.e. Definition and Examples of Agreement in English Grammar, Definition and Examples of Pronoun Agreement, Relative Clause Definition and Examples in English, 100 Key Terms Used in the Study of Grammar, Definition and Examples of Postmodifiers in English Grammar, Personal Pronoun Definition and Examples in English. The prefix ante (meaning before) might make you think that the word the pronoun refers to necessarily comes before the pronoun. Usage - Pronoun-Antecedent Agreement. If it’s not clear which thing the pronoun refers to, the reader can get quite confused. Expression that gives its meaning to a pro-form in grammar, Definitions of "antecedent" along these lines can be found, for instance, in Crystal (1999:20) and Radford (2004:322), For an example of a linguist who rejects the term antecedent because of the confusion it generates (due to the failure to distinguish between antecedents and postcedents), see, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antecedent_(grammar)&oldid=999759423, Short description is different from Wikidata, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, This page was last edited on 11 January 2021, at 20:39. a word, phrase, or clause, usually a substantive, that is replaced by a pronoun or other substitute later, or occasionally earlier, in the same or in another, usually subsequent, sentence. How Does Concord Apply to English Grammar? Susan arrived late because traffic held her up.The noun her refers to and takes its meaning from Susan, so Susan is the antecedent of her. 2. However, their antecedents are present in the discourse context as the speaker and the listener. that gives its meaning to a proform (pronoun, pro-verb, pro-adverb, etc.). A proform takes its meaning from its antecedent, e.g. In this article I will discuss the meaning and context of antecedent in detail so you can better understand the word and use it in your everyday language reading and writing. There are a number of things that you need to keep in mind with antecedents in grammar. an‧te‧ced‧ent /ˌæntəˈsiːdənt/ noun [ countable] 1 formal. that gives its meaning to a pro-form (pronoun, pro-verb, pro-adverb, etc.). From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. ANTECEDENTS AND PERSONAL PRONOUNS Often, an antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause that you replace with a third-person personal pronoun: THIRD-PERSON PERSONAL PRONOUNS he, him, his, himself she, her, hers, herself it, its, itself This page includes dozens of examples of antecedents of the different types of pronoun. That means that the thing (or person, or place) that the pronoun refers to needs to have been mentioned already by name somewhere earlier in the sentence or paragraph. For example, consider the sentence, "There was a doll inside the box, which was made of clay" where the word "which" could refer to either the box or the doll. Pronoun-antecedent agreement is a concept within language in which a pronoun must function properly and agree with the antecedent to which it refers.A pronoun takes the place of a noun within a sentence, such as "it" or "his," while an antecedent is the noun in a sentence to which a pronoun refers and takes the place of. More broadly, an antecedent may be any word in a sentence (or in a sequence of sentences) that another word or phrase refers to. Often, an antecedent is the word, phrase, or clause that you replace with a third-person personal pronoun: An antecedent is a word for which a pronoun stands. Editing Exercise: Correcting Errors in Pronoun Reference, Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia, M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester, B.A., English, State University of New York. An antecedent (AN-tuh-SEE-dent) is a grammatical device in which a pronoun, noun, or other word refers to an earlier noun or phrase.For example, in the sentence “Sally walked her dog,” the pronoun her refers to Sally, making Sally the antecedent. Menu ... (grammar) A word, phrase or clause referred to by a pronoun. ). Sentences d and h above contain relative clauses; the proforms when and which are relative proforms. This list of proforms and the types of antecedents that they take is by no means exhaustive, but rather it is intended to merely deliver an impression of the breadth of expressions that can function as proforms and antecedents. Technically speaking, a pronoun is … When you check your own sentences to determine if the pronouns agree with their antecedents in both number and person, look first for what the antecedent is. The linguistic term that is closely related to antecedent and proform is anaphora. 1. countable noun An antecedent of something happened or existed before it and was similar to it in some way. Definite proforms such as they and you also have an indefinite use, which means they denote some person or people in general, e.g. … Define antecedent: An antecedent is a word to which another word, usually a pronoun, refers. In grammar, an antecedent is a word that another word refers back to. It is an English grammar based word which has some context that we need to understand in order to use it in the right way. technical a word, phrase, or sentence that is represented by another word, for example a pronoun … In English grammar, an antecedent is the noun or noun phrase that a pronoun refers to. Rule-based patterns are composed of a number of primitive patterns (antecedents) connected together with logical connectives that imply, if true, the target class (consequent). This practice is a source of confusion and some have therefore denounced the term antecedent outright because of this confusion.[4].

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