Antecedents Worksheets

Related ELA Standard: L.3.1.F

Core Standard
Answer Keys Here

An antecedent, in the grammatical sense, is a word that is replaced by a different word later on in the sentence. Most commonly the word used later in the sentence is a pronoun. In most cases the antecedents is found before the pronoun. An example would be the sentence: "Sally ran in the New York City marathon yesterday, so today she is exhausted." In this sentence "Sally" is the antecedent and the pronoun used is "she". As we have seen in the previous sentence antecedents-pronoun agreement is something we need to consider as we are writing these ourselves. In the case of the same sentence, gender needed to agree to make the sentence valid. One main consideration when using an antecedent is making certain that the quantity of the original word and the pronoun are in agreement. You will often need to use and explore collective nouns in this context. These worksheets and lessons will help students learn how to identify and make sure to use proper grammatical mechanics with this technique in mind.

Antecedents Worksheets To Print:

Using Pronouns - In each sentence, underline the pronoun. Then identify its antecedent and write it on the linie.

Identification - You will need to breakdown thoughts in each sentence.

Double Match - You will dissect the purpose of words within a sentence and state how they relate.

Nouns That Match - Choose an noun from the box that makes sense to act as the antecedent in each sentence.

Create Pronouns - Complete each sentence with an appropriate pronoun.

In Agreement - Which word set of the highlighted pairs works best for you?

Creative Writing - Write a sentence (or a pair of sentences) to answer each prompt. Underline the what we are studying in each of your sentences.

What With Bold? - You will look at the bold in each sentence and find the correlating term.

Match It - Which word would put this to bed for you?

Sentence Rewrites - Rewrite the second sentence in each pair, replacing the antecedent with a pronoun.

Technical Thoughts - Write a pair of sentences that uses each pronoun as a subject pronoun or an object pronoun in the second sentence, as indicated.

Sentence Writing - You will write your own sentences while paying attention to your mechanics on this technique.

Where It Belongs - Match each sentence in the left column with the sentence in the right column that belongs with it.

More Editing Practice - Rewrite the second sentence in each pair, replacing the underlined nouns from the first sentence with a pronoun so they become antecedents in the sentence.

Replacing Nouns with Pronouns - A pronoun is a word that takes the place of a noun. The word that a pronoun takes the place of is called the antecedent. Rewrite the second sentence in each set, replacing the subject noun(s) with a pronoun(s).

Considerations When Working with Demonstrative and Relative Pronouns

When we are writing there are some tricky instances of the use of an antecedent. This often comes up when working with demonstrative pronouns. These are words that used to point to something very specific in a sentence. Common words that fall under this classification include: that, these, this, and those. When these terms are present the antecedent can often be in form of a phrase or clause instead of a single word. It can often carry over multiple sentences as well. We can explore this with the example sentence, "Mike drives a scooter to college. This is a very environment friendly form of transport." In this sentence, we can see that the "scooter" serves as the antecedent and the demonstrative pronoun (This) is found at the start of the secondary sentence.


In the case of relative pronouns, the antecedent can serve as a point of reference for the pronoun. This is a concrete relationship. They will always be positioned in this order within the sentence. You can see this technique in the sentence, "Doctor Stevens, whom graduated from Havard Medical School, will perform the surgery on dad tomorrow." In this sentence "Doctor Stevens" serves as the antecedent and is replaced by the relative pronoun "whom".