Does the following sentence have an antecedent? If so, where?: Scott visited Sara on his day off.

1 Answer
Mar 22, 2016

yes, "Scott"

Explanation:

An antecedent describes or clarifies an otherwise unknown pronoun.

For example, in the sentence, the phrase

#"his day off"#

is used.

The question we should ask ourself is, whose day off?

When all that's said is his day off, we must know who his is referring to.

Luckily, the sentence already has clarified who his is talking about— Scott.

We could rewrite the sentence as

#"Scott visited Sara on Scott's day off."#

But, this sounds clunky, so in place of Scott, we use his:

#color(red)("Scott")# #"visited Sara on"# #color(red)"his"# #"day off."#

Since his is referring to Scott, Scott is the antecedent, meaning it comes before his to demonstrate what the pronoun is referring to.