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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.
A full conditional thus contains two clauses: the subordinate clause, called the antecedent (or protasis or if-clause), which expresses the condition, and the main clause, called the consequent (or apodosis or then-clause) expressing the result. To form conditional sentences, languages use a variety of grammatical forms and constructions.
Prototypical conditional sentences in English are those of the form "If X, then Y". The clause X is referred to as the antecedent (or protasis), while the clause Y is called the consequent (or apodosis). A conditional is understood as expressing its consequent under the temporary hypothetical assumption of its antecedent.
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 ...
When the "restrictive" relative clause is removed from either of the above sentences, the antecedent ("the father" and "the clergyman") is not placed in question. In the first example, for instance, there is no suggestion that the narrator has two fathers because the relative clause does not express a distinguishing property of the subject ...
However, this does not mean that P and Q need to have the same meaning (e.g., P could be "equiangular trilateral" and Q could be "equilateral triangle"). When phrased as a sentence, the antecedent is the subject and the consequent is the predicate of a universal affirmative proposition (e.g., in the phrase "all men are mortal", "men" is the ...
These examples, one from mathematics and one from natural language, illustrate the concept of vacuous truths: "For any integer x, if x > 5 then x > 3." [11] – This statement is true non-vacuously (since some integers are indeed greater than 5), but some of its implications are only vacuously true: for example, when x is the integer 2, the statement implies the vacuous truth that "if 2 > 5 ...
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 ...