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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.
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.
The earlier occurrence is known as the antecedent and the other is called a proform, anaphor, or reference. However, pronouns can sometimes refer forward, as in "When she arrived home, Alice went to sleep." In such cases, the coreference is called cataphoric rather than anaphoric. Coreference is important for binding phenomena in the field of ...
Agreement based on grammatical person is found mostly between verb and subject. An example from English ( I am vs. he is) has been given in the introduction to this article. Agreement between pronoun (or corresponding possessive adjective) and antecedent also requires the selection of the correct person. For example, if the antecedent is the ...
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and ...
Singular. they. Singular they, along with its inflected or derivative forms, them, their, theirs, and themselves (also themself and theirself ), is a gender-neutral third-person pronoun. It typically occurs with an indeterminate antecedent, in sentences such as: " Somebody left their umbrella in the office.
Binding (linguistics) In linguistics, binding is the phenomenon in which anaphoric elements such as pronouns are grammatically associated with their antecedents. [citation needed] For instance in the English sentence "Mary saw herself", the anaphor "herself" is bound by its antecedent "Mary". Binding can be licensed or blocked in certain ...
The element in the main clause that the relative pronoun in the relative clause stands for (house in the above example) is the antecedent of that pronoun.In most cases the antecedent is a nominal (noun or noun phrase), though the pronoun can also refer to a whole proposition, as in "The train was late, which annoyed me greatly", where the antecedent of the relative pronoun which is the clause ...