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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.
The forms of verbs used in the antecedent and consequent are often subject to particular rules as regards their tense, aspect, and mood. Many languages have a specialized type of verb form called the conditional mood – broadly equivalent in meaning to the English "would (do something)" – for use in some types of conditional sentences.
The a-sentences are fine because the reflexive or reciprocal pronoun has its antecedent within the clause. The b-sentences, in contrast, do not allow the indicated reading, a fact illustrating that personal pronouns have a distribution that is different from that of reflexive and reciprocal pronouns.
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 ...
A non-restrictive relative clause may have a whole sentence as its antecedent rather than a specific noun phrase; for example: The cat was allowed on the bed, which annoyed the dog. Here, which refers not to the bed or the cat but to the entire proposition expressed in the main clause, namely the situation of the cat being allowed on the bed.
In propositional logic, affirming the consequent (also known as converse error, fallacy of the converse, or confusion of necessity and sufficiency) is a formal fallacy (or an invalid form of argument) that is committed when, in the context of an indicative conditional statement, it is stated that because the consequent is true, therefore the ...
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.