0 someone or something existing or happening before, especially as the cause or origin of something existing or happening later:
1 previous:
When the college was established in 1546, it inherited a hall from each of three antecedent institutions.
2 something existing or happening before, esp. as the cause of an event or situation:
In writing rules we omit set notation for antecedents and sometimes we omit the label when it is not relevant for the context.
Research on mass politics seeks to identify the antecedents of citizens' political attitudes and behaviours.
First, there is the problem of disjunctive antecedents, as in (4).
Thus, reflexives with such antecedents and their interpretation are primarily syntactically-based, just as local reflexives are.
However, those rules consisting of a large number of antecedents may be worth examining as they may refer either to noise or a special case.
Rule-based patterns are composed of a number of primitive patterns (antecedents) connected together with logical connectives that imply, if true, the target class (consequent).
By the same token, different effects imply different causal antecedents.
Who gained ground with those in cataphora only once it had been established as the relative for personal antecedents.
