antecedent

The antecedent of the opinion’s only masculine pronoun is a hypothetical “biological male who identifies as male,” and the hypothetical counterpart who “identifies as female” gets no pronoun.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026

They found that physical frailty can be an indicator of future social isolation over time and that loneliness may be both an antecedent and an outcome of frailty.

From Science Daily ● Nov. 14, 2024

Maybe the closest antecedent is a new, $85 million HUD program called “Pathways to Removing Obstacles to Housing,” or PRO Housing, which this summer issued 17 grants of a few million dollars each.

From Slate ● Sep. 24, 2024

The setting recalls Don DeLillo’s novel “The Names,” but the true antecedent is Philip Roth’s “Sabbath’s Theater,” which Freiman name-checks.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 14, 2023

A high school teacher complained that it did, because the possessive phrase Toni Morrison’s cannot serve as the antecedent of the pronoun her.

From "The Sense of Style" by Steven Pinker

While going rather easy on King George, Ms. Worsley is dismayed by the strategy of her antecedents, whose tactics often seemed calculated to fan the sputtering flames of rebellion.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 2, 2026

There are antecedents for what Universal is attempting.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 5, 2025

The current wave of activism, he observes, is not so different from its antecedents.

From Salon ● May 2, 2024

“If I do something that shocks me or that I’m not proud of, I’m able to frame that behaviorally and sort of understand the antecedents, the behavior itself and then the consequence,” she said.

From Seattle Times ● Dec. 1, 2023

The habanera and its contredanse antecedents had a highly distinctive accompanying rhythm of four beats, which in musical notation - as in the opening of the Bizet song - looks like this.

From "The Story of Music" by Howard Goodall