English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...

, a pronoun has a possessive antecedent if its antecedent (the noun that it refers to) appears in the

possessive case A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ...

; for example, in the following sentence, ''Winston Churchill'' is a possessive antecedent, serving as it does as the antecedent for the pronoun ''him'': :Winston Churchill's history shows him to have been a good writer. In the 1960s, some usage guides started to reject the use of possessive antecedents. These guides argue that a pronoun's antecedent cannot be a noun in a possessive construct; in this case, they contend that ''Winston Churchill'', embedded as it is in the construct ''Winston Churchill's'', cannot serve as the antecedent for the pronoun ''him''. The basis for this contention is that a pronoun's antecedent must be a noun, so that if ''Winston Churchill's'' is an adjective, then a pronoun cannot refer back to it. This rule does not reflect ordinary English usage, and it is commonly ignored (intentionally or otherwise) even by those who have heard of it.

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