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Antecedent (grammar) 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.
Lexical semantics (also known as lexicosemantics), as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. [1] [2] It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, [1] and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
Coreference. In linguistics, coreference, sometimes written co-reference, occurs when two or more expressions refer to the same person or thing; they have the same referent. For example, in Bill said Alice would arrive soon, and she did, the words Alice and she refer to the same person. [ 1]
Conditional sentence. Conditional sentences are natural language sentences that express that one thing is contingent on something else, e.g. "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the dependent clause. A full conditional thus contains two clauses: a ...
Antecedent (logic) 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: This is a nonlogical formulation of a hypothetical proposition. In this case, the antecedent is P, and the consequent is Q.
Anaphora (linguistics) In linguistics, anaphora ( / əˈnæfərə /) 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 ...
A reflexive pronoun is a pronoun that refers to another noun or pronoun (its antecedent) within the same sentence. In the English language specifically, a reflexive pronoun will end in -self or -selves, and refer to a previously named noun or pronoun ( myself, yourself, ourselves, themselves, etc.). English intensive pronouns, used for emphasis ...
Generic antecedent. Generic antecedents are representatives of classes, referred to in ordinary language by another word (most often a pronoun ), in a situation in which gender is typically unknown or irrelevant. [1] These mostly arise in generalizations and are particularly common in abstract, theoretical or strategic discourse.