yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Pronoun-antecedent agreement | Syntax | Khan Academy


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Hello grammarians! Hello visiting cousin Beth! Hello cousin David!

So today, we're going to be talking about pronoun antecedent agreement. And what is that? So an antecedent is a thing that goes before. So 'ante' means before and 'seedent' is like a going, a thing.

So what I mean by that is if we're talking about, if we set up something in a sentence. So, okay, we've got a sentence like, "Jillian rode her bike to the grocery store." Fine, straight-up sentence, pretty ordinary. Uh, if we want to refer to Jillian again, we want to use a pronoun. Well, we'd refer to Jillian as 'she.' That's a woman's name, so she…

She bought some garlic and a spoon, like you normally would when you go to the grocery store. So when we talk about this pronoun 'she' in relation to this word, this proper noun 'Jillian,' Jillian is the antecedent. It's the thing that goes before the pronoun 'she.'

So whenever you use a pronoun, you are referring back to something else—the thing that went before, the antecedent—the thing that has come previously. And so you want to make sure that these things match up.

So for example, we know from living in this culture that Jillian is a woman's name. So it would probably be incorrect to refer to her as 'he.'

"Jillian rode her bike to the grocery store. He bought some garlic and a spoon." This sounds like we're talking about someone else, right? So even within this initial sentence too, "Jillian rode her bike to the grocery store," we're referring back to Jillian using this possessive pronoun to define the bicycle.

Oh, because it's a longer sentence. Well, we're using it to demonstrate the relationship between Jillian and the bicycle.

Gotcha! Yeah, and you also want to make sure that pronouns and their antecedents agree in number. So if you said, uh, what's a fun animal? Monkeys!

"So the monkeys threw snowballs, but they had crummy aim." Right? So we're using 'they' to refer back to the monkeys. So this thing is a plural noun, right? We're referring to multiple monkeys. So it’d be incorrect to say, "The monkeys threw snowballs, but it had crummy aim," because this makes it seem like we're talking about one monkey when in fact we are talking about an army of snowball-chucking monkeys.

So we've got our little monkey—maybe a colobus monkey or maybe a Diana monkey. It's got a little tuft, it's throwing a snowball. But if that's an Old World monkey, it probably doesn't have a prehensile tail; it just sort of has a little tail.

But let's say we have a whole bunch of them, right? We want to make sure that we are operating under the standards of agreement. Beth, any questions?

So you can't have it anymore because now you've got four monkeys, right? So let me get rid of that.

So what should it be instead, Beth?

"They!" Because 'they' is plural, and we don't know if they're he's or she's. And even if we didn't, we're 'they' kind of eliminates any kind of gender distinction.

Ah, right! So the monkeys threw snowballs, but they had crummy aim. Although these monkeys seem to be doing pretty good at hitting each other in the heads and the tails with their snowballs.

So that's pronoun antecedent agreement.

So remember to make sure to line things up when relevant by gender. So Jillian rode her bike; she bought some garlic and a spoon; and by number, so the monkeys threw snowballs, but they had crummy aim. So there's more than one monkey, so you'd want to use the plural third-person pronoun.

You can learn anything! David out! And Beth out!

More Articles

View All
Buy REAL Dino Teeth! ... and more! LÜT #20
An R2-D2 pepper mill and cologne that makes you smell like Play-doh. It’s episode 20 of LÜT. This wallet looks like a lot of hundreds, and these bars of soap from ThinkGeek contain caffeine, really. Each shower you take delivers the same as a cuppa coffe…
Rediscovering Youth on the Colorado River | Short Film Showcase
[Music] When I was born in the summer of ‘86, my dad wrote me these words: “The important places, child of mine, come as you grow. In youth you will learn the secret places: the cave behind the waterfall, the arms of the oak that hold you high, the stars…
Ross Ice Shelf Research | Continent 7: Antarctica
The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest lump of floating ice in the world. So little is known; the surface of Pluto has much better imagery than what’s beneath Raphael. It’s a lot of new stuff that we’re going to discover. No one’s ever done this before; it’s e…
Derivative of __ | Advanced derivatives | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
What we have right over here is the graph of ( y ) is equal to ( e^x ). What we’re going to know by the end of this video is one of the most fascinating ideas in calculus, and once again, it reinforces the idea that ( e ) is really this somewhat magical n…
How Amazon Is Losing Money To Make Money
When is it okay for your business to lose money? Amateurs will say never, but the big guys know that’s not exactly true. Amazon is bleeding money on Prime, and they’re pleased about it. Here’s why. Welcome to a Lux. Now, before we dive into what’s been g…
15 Steps To Force Your Way Out Of Poverty
Poor people work just as hard, if not harder, than those born into wealth. However, that hard work rarely translates into wealth because poverty, as a system, is designed for survival, not growth. You have just enough to get by until tomorrow but never en…