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In grammar, an antecedent is one or more words that establish the meaning of a pronoun or other pro-form. [1] For example, in the sentence "John arrived late because traffic held him up," the word "John" is the antecedent of the pronoun "him." Pro-forms usually follow their antecedents, but sometimes precede them.
An antecedent is the first half of a hypothetical proposition, whenever the if-clause precedes the then-clause. In some contexts the antecedent is called the protasis. [1] Examples: If , then . This is a nonlogical formulation of a hypothetical proposition. In this case, the antecedent is P, and the consequent is Q.
Linguists and philosophers of language sometimes avoid the term counterfactuals because not all examples express counterfactual meanings. For instance, the "Anderson Case" has the characteristic grammatical form of a counterfactual conditional, but is in fact used as part of an argument for the truth of its antecedent. [7] [8]
In linguistics, anaphora (/ ə ˈ n æ f ər ə /) is the use of an expression whose interpretation depends upon another expression in context (its antecedent).In a narrower sense, anaphora is the use of an expression that depends specifically upon an antecedent expression and thus is contrasted with cataphora, which is the use of an expression that depends upon a postcedent expression.
The first of these sentences is a basic zero conditional with both clauses in the present tense. The fourth is an example of the use of will in a condition clause [4] (for more such cases, see below). The use of verb tenses, moods and aspects in the parts of such sentences follows general principles, as described in Uses of English verb forms.
In English grammar, a pronoun has a possessive antecedent if its antecedent (the noun that it refers to) appears in the possessive case; for example, in the following sentence, Winston Churchill is a possessive antecedent, serving as it does as the antecedent for the pronoun him: Winston Churchill's history shows him to have been a good writer.
past participle clauses having an unvoiced zero object argument that takes an antecedent to the argument: The body found ∅ here yesterday has now been identified. (This is the "reduced object passive relative clause"; see Reduced relative clause § Non-finite types. For further examples see Uses of English verb forms § Uses of nonfinite verbs.
As shown in (4), PRO can function as an antecedent for reflexives: in (4a) PRO is the antecedent for the reflexive pronoun 'myself', and in (4b) PRO functions as the antecedent for the impersonal reflexive oneself. If the null subject PRO were not present in examples like (4a) and (4b), then non-finite clauses would contain anaphors that lacked ...