Pronoun-antecedent agreement | Syntax | Khan Academy

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!