at an earlier time or formerly; "she had previously lived in Chicago"; "he was previously president of a bank"; "better than anything previously proposed"; "a previously unquestioned attitude"; "antecedently arranged"
The antecedent of a rule is its left-hand side, that is, the first argument to the #$implies connective with which the rule begins Intuitively, every rule states that if the antecedent is true, then the consequent must be true
the referent of an anaphor; a phrase or clause that is referred to by an anaphoric pronoun a preceding occurrence or cause or event anything that precedes something similar in time; "phrenology was an antecedent of modern neuroscience"
A stimulus (i e a verbal cue, activity, event or person) that immediately precedes a behavior This stimulus may or may not serve as discriminative for a specific behavior
An antecedent is a word to which a pronoun refers In the following sentence, the antecedent for the pronoun "it" is the word "car": The new car is stylish, but it is also economical
(korrelat): term used in connection with relative pronouns and relative clauses The antecedent of a relative pronoun or a relative clause is the noun phrase that the pronoun or the clause refers back to In the following examples the antecedent of the relative clause is underlined: This is a book that I recommend Our new English teacher, who did not know the building, had trouble finding the auditorium
The propositional component of a conditional proposition whose truth is the condition for the truth of the consequent In "if p then q", "p" is the antecedent
When an association between two variables is defined, the first item (or left-hand side) is called the antecedent For example, in the relationship "When a prospector buys a pick, he buys a shovel 14% of the time," "buys a pick" is the antecedent
An antecedent of something happened or existed before it and was similar to it in some way. We shall first look briefly at the historical antecedents of this theory. = precursor