Antecedent (grammar)

MARI In grammar, an antecedent is generally the noun or noun phrase to which an anaphor refers in a coreference. However, an antecedent can also be a clause, especially when the anaphor is a demonstrative. In these sentences, the antecedent is in bold and the anaphor in italics:

I met Bob at the party. He was telling me about his new friend.

In the above, the pronoun 'He' is referring to the noun 'Bob'.

A common stylistic problem in writing, often leading to ambiguity, is the use of a pronoun for which the antecedent is not clear, as in the following example:

I met John at Mike's party. He told me about his new friend.

Did John tell the speaker about his own new friend? Did John tell the speaker about Mike's new friend? Did Mike tell the speaker about his own new friend? Or did Mike tell the speaker about John's new friend? Generally most competent speakers would agree that "he" refers to "John", this is normally explained in terms of salience, even still in ordinary speech, listeners are often confused by such sentences. Occasionally, the antecedent may be missing from the discourse, as when someone wonders out loud: "I wonder where I put it?", with no clear antecedent for the pronoun "it." Also the antecedent may not occur in the current discourse but instead refer to an object familiar to both speaker and listener, for example "the FBI."

Antecedents are of particular importance in connection with relative pronouns; the pronoun usually opens the relative clause, but the antecedent is located in the main clause.

As I was going up the stairs, I met a man who wasn't there...

Sometimes the anaphor may not appear, but be implied by syntactic principles, this is called a zero anaphor.

Jack and Jill went up the hill, to fetch a pail of water.

(In this sentence, no anaphor appears explicitly, but an implicit zero anaphor, coreferent with the main clause subject, is the subject of the verb "fetch".)

An antecedent may also be a clause as in this example

"I guess he's enjoying himself."
"Yes, that's right"

In the following example the antecedent is separated by the verb.

A situation has arisen that calls for immediate action.

Different languages employ this to varying degrees. For example, in Arabic and Hebrew it is not permitted at all (the antecedent must always come right before the relative pronoun or conjunction or clause), in English it is used to avoid awkward constructions, and in German such separation is frequent due to the practice of shunting the verb to the end of the sentence. In Spanish, the antecedent often appears after the verb, preceding an adjective (dependent) clause (e.g., "Busco una novia que sea sensible" meaning "I'm looking for a girlfriend who is sensible").

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