Talk:Antecedent (grammar)

Unclear examples

I followed the simple example about John, but the following 2 examples are completely unclear to me. The antecedent is shown in bold, but I don't see at all the pronoun as in the John example. Please clarify on the article page!

• The family that eats together, stays together.
• As I was going up the stairs, I met a man who wasn't there...

Rugops 09:30, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

The first example marks a zero anaphor, that is an anaphor which has no surface representation but is inferred by syntax or semantics, in this example a zero anaphor appears as the subject of the verb stays. The second example the pronoun is the relative pronoun who. I will add a clarification for the first, the second I feel is well enough explained on the page.

--Johnmccrae 15:08, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

As I parse it, the subject of "eats" is "that", whose antecedent is "the family", and the subject of "stays" is the whole phrase "The family that eats together". -phma 00:02, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Yes, this is not a good example of zero anaphora. I have replaced the sentence in the article. CapnPrep 15:49, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

I replaced the phrase "of duncular import" with "used." I wanted to make sure "duncular" was not a piece of obscure linguistics jargon, and found that it has no entry in the OED. It may have some technical significance in botany. anon — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.155.194.124 (talk) 19:00, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

Interpretation of example

When discussing the second example - (I met John at Mike's party. He told me about his new friend),
the line: Did John tell the speaker about Mike's new girlfriend? should instead read - Did John tell the speaker about Mike's new friend? - as there is no mention of a girlfriend in the example. 129.21.129.143 (talk) 23:18, 26 November 2007 (UTC)PN

I still don't know what an antecedent is talk in simpler words —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.184.179.230 (talk) 22:26, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Removal of prescriptiveness and subjectivity

Regarding the third paragraph down - I took the liberty of editing it (with the utmost respect to the original author). I would generally have discussed this on the discussion page first, but in this case I just could not stand how prescriptively and subjectively the section had been written. This is a linguistics-related article and thus must be (yes must) as objective as possible and serve as a more descriptive analysis about how speakers actually use language, and not about how they should or should not....the piece argued that a plural anaphor should not be used with a "singular" referent, but this thinking is erroneous in that this usage is applied all the time and there is no real ambiguity in the first example given. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Nimic86 (talk • contribs) 21:26, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

With respect, I would just throw out this whole paragraph. It's not all that relevant to the discussion of what an antecedent is, and this article is not really the place for an exposition on prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar. I think this paragraph detracts from the overall flow of the article, although I will admit that the whole article as it stands is confusing and needs a lot of work. Ketone16 (talk) 16:05, 30 April 2010 (UTC)

Poor example of unclear antecedents

The section titled Unclear antecedents includes the following:

A common stylistic problem in writing, often leading to confusion, 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 John's new friend? Did John tell the speaker about Mike's new friend? Did Mike tell the speaker about Mike's new friend? Or did Mike tell the speaker about John's new friend? Generally most listeners would interpret "he" as referring to "John", but would find the antecedent of "his" to be unclear.

I disagree that the statement about John is confusingly ambiguous, and I disagree most strongly with the final assumption. I would not "find the antecedent of 'his' to be unclear," nor do I agree that "most listeners" would find it unclear.

In reading the example, I believe most readers' first assumption would be that both he and his refer to John. It would not naturally occur to me that either pronoun refers to Mike. Although technically it is possible for either of them to refer to Mike, my natural assumption is that both pronouns refer to the most prominent person in the antecedent clause when there is no indication otherwise. To assume that John is telling me about Mike's new friend would be distinctly awkward and unnatural unless there were some other indicator that that is whom John was talking about, and in the example as given there is no such indicator.

The reason John is the natural antecedent of both he and his is that John is the focus of the preceding sentence, not Mike. The narrator (the I of the first sentence and the me of the second) is telling us about John, not about Mike. Mike is mentioned only to give the context in which the narrator met and was conversing with John, but the narrator's focus is on John, so mine is also. Since my focus is on John, I naturally assume that any third person singular masculine pronouns that immediately follow refer to him - to John - not to Mike or anyone else.

The statement given here as an example is no more ambiguous than any other statement using a third person pronoun. In any statement with a third person pronoun, its antecedent is technically ambiguous because that is simply the nature of third person pronouns: they are inherently ambiguous; and the only way to avoid the ambiguity inherent in third person pronouns is not to use them.

So although the example given is an example of ambiguity, it is no better an example than any other use of third person pronouns. "John gave me his hat" is equally ambiguous, because it could mean that John gave me his or any other man's hat; and assuming that John was telling me about his own new friend is no less natural than assuming that John gave me his own hat.

The existing example also fails because it cannot reasonably be made any less ambiguous than it is. To eliminate ambiguity completely would require eliminating the pronouns or qualifying them so heavily that the statement becomes practically unreadable. The only way to force the reader to see John (or Mike) unambiguously as the antecedent is to replace he with the man's name; and having done that, the only way to make his absolutely unambiguous is to replace it with his own; so that the example becomes

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

The fact the statement now is extraordinarily awkward is a pretty good sign that it was not in fact inherently confusing in its original form.

A much better example of a confusingly ambiguous antecedent would be one in which two or more persons are given equal focus in the antecedent statement. If the example were

I met John and Mike at the party. He told me about his new friend.

then both he and his are outrageously and irreconcilably ambiguous, and it is impossible to resolve who the antecedent is without additional information (although it is still natural to assume that both he and his refer to the same person). This example also obviates the rather tedious series of questions required to force the reader to see the existing example as being ambiguous. That example becomes confusing only after the series of questions has made it confusing; on its own it is no more confusing than "John gave me his hat." My example is so blatantly ambiguous that it confuses the reader without any prodding at all.

I have considered several possibilities, involving replacing the existing example with mine, adding mine to the existing example, etc. But since this is a short and simple article, and since it (or any other Wikipedia article) is addressed primarily to amateurs, not to experts, the more obvious example (mine) is the more effective example. Therefore I am going to replace the existing example with mine and make the other minor modifications required to fit it in. I am also going to remove the words "common" and "often" from the first sentence. To say that antecedents that are so ambiguous as to cause confusion are common is an overstatement. If they were common, communication would be even less successful than it is.--Jim10701 (talk) 13:55, 10 August 2011 (UTC) this helped me:) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.61.19.11 (talk) 13:55, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I just have to marvel at this example spotted in the wild:

"When they returned, the peshmerga asked them to identify themselves," Hekmat told The Associated Press. "They answered in Arabic, that's when peshmerga started shooting. It was their fault."^[1]

Right now though unclear antecedent is not indexed, and the article seems stripped of everything about it, even though it's the most common form in which the word is encountered. Wnt (talk) 13:20, 8 March 2015 (UTC)

Am I saying the word correctly

and what do we do with the people who have naturally been speaking in this method of threading discernment for the listener or the sucker jk😁 2604:CA00:138:8461:0:0:68:11F2 (talk) 17:21, 27 March 2023 (UTC)