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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.
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 following three subsections consider the binding domains that are relevant for the distribution of pronouns and nouns in English. The discussion follows the outline provided by the traditional binding theory (see below), which divides nominals into three basic categories: reflexive and reciprocal pronouns, personal pronouns, and nouns (common and proper).
The English relative words are words in English used to mark a clause, noun phrase or preposition phrase as relative. The central relative words in English include who, whom, whose, which, why, and while, as shown in the following examples, each of which has the relative clause in bold: We should celebrate the things which we hold dear.
A conditional sentence is a sentence in a natural language that expresses that one thing is contingent on another, e.g., "If it rains, the picnic will be cancelled." They are so called because the impact of the sentence’s main clause is conditional on a subordinate clause.
Examples of accepted, disputed, and impossible constructions in English include: All people get hungry, so they eat. Acceptable (All people is plural.) All people get hungry, so she eats. Incorrect if all people is the intended antecedent of she (singular pronoun cannot have a plural antecedent.) Each one gets thirsty, so he drinks.
past participle clauses having an unvoiced zero object argument that takes an antecedent to the argument: The body found Ø 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.
For example, in Bill said he would come, the word he may or may not refer to Bill. Determining which expressions are coreferences is an important part of analyzing or understanding the meaning, and often requires information from the context, real-world knowledge, such as tendencies of some names to be associated with particular species ("Rover ...