In grammar, an antecedent is a word that shows what a pronoun or other word refers to. For example, in the sentence "John arrived late because traffic held him up," the word "John" is the antecedent of the pronoun "him." Pronouns and other words that replace nouns usually come after their antecedents, but sometimes they come before them. When this happens, the more precise term is "postcedent," though this term is not often used separately from "antecedent" because the definition of antecedent usually includes both cases. A related language term is "anaphora." Studies of sentence structure examine how antecedents and postcedents differ in terms of how they connect to other words.

Examples

Many types of words or phrases can act as the antecedent for a pro-form. Examples show different pro-forms and their antecedents. In these examples, the pro-forms are shown in bold, and their antecedents are underlined.

This list is not complete, but it gives an idea of how many different expressions can be pro-forms or antecedents. Usually, a pro-form is a pronoun, and its antecedent is a noun or noun phrase. However, these examples show that almost any type of word or phrase can be an antecedent for a pro-form. The pro-forms themselves vary widely. Some examples are especially interesting because they show that certain pro-forms can have antecedents made up of words that are not next to each other, meaning the antecedents are not single units.

A common type of pro-form appears in relative clauses. Many relative clauses include a relative pronoun, and these pronouns have an antecedent. Sentences 'd' and 'h' include relative clauses, and the pro-forms "when" and "which" are relative pro-forms.

Uncertain antecedents

Sometimes, a sentence may have unclear references, meaning a pronoun or phrase might point to more than one noun or idea earlier in the text. This happens when the pronoun matches two or more earlier nouns in number, gender, or logic. To fix this, experts suggest changing the sentence structure to be more specific or repeating the noun instead of using only a pronoun.

For example, in the sentence "There was a doll inside the box that was made of clay," the word "that" could refer to either the doll or the box. To clarify that the doll is made of clay, the sentence could be rewritten as: "Inside the box, there was a doll that was made of clay," "Inside the box, there was a doll made of clay," or "There was a girl doll inside the box, and she was made of clay."

Unclear references can also occur when the word being referred to is far from the pronoun or phrase. Bryan Garner calls these "remote relatives" and uses an example from The New York Times:

— Patrick E. Tyler, “War Imminent as Hussein Rejects Ultimatum,” N.Y. Times, 19 Mar. 2003

Garner explains that the phrase "that were… the border" refers to "messages," which appears 7 words earlier in the sentence. However, the phrase could also refer to "the Iraqi people," making the meaning unclear.

Postcedents

The prefix "ante-" in the word "antecedent" means "before" or "in front of." However, when a pro-form (a word that replaces another word) comes before its antecedent, the antecedent is not actually an "ante cedent" (something that comes before). Instead, it is a "post cedent," where "post-" means "after" or "behind." The examples below show this difference, with pro-forms in bold and their postcedents underlined:

Postcedents are much less common than antecedents. In practice, people often use the term "antecedent" to describe both antecedents and postcedents, even though they are different. This can cause confusion. Because of this, some people argue that using the term "antecedent" to refer to postcedents is not correct.

Implied antecedents

Some pronouns do not have a direct word or phrase that comes before them in the conversation. Instead, their meaning is understood from the context of the conversation or from what people generally know. For example, first-person pronouns like I, me, we, and us, and the second-person pronoun you usually do not have a direct word before them. However, they refer to the person speaking and the person listening. Pronouns like it in the sentence "It is raining" also do not have a direct word before them. In this case, it is used to talk about the weather without pointing to a specific thing. Pronouns such as they and you can also be used in a general way to refer to people in general, as in the sentence "They will get you for that." In these cases, they do not refer to a specific person or group mentioned earlier.