distantcrimson wrote:
I was looking at some examples of indefinite pronouns and came across this sentence:
"All of the cake was gone before we had a chance to try it"
The text goes on to sat that 'all' is an indefinite pronouns, and words like 'each','both','everyone','all' etc are always indefinite and do not have an antecedent in the sentence.
What I do not understand is that there seems to be a very clear antecedent in this case - the cake. The pronoun 'all' refers to the cake, the entirety of it to be specific. From what I understand any pronoun without an antecedent is considered grammatically incorrect unless it is an indefinite pronoun.
Some more examples:
"Each of the students is missing his or her homework" - clear that the antecedent is students.
Hello
distantcrimson,
We hope this finds you well.
To answer your query, in a strictly grammatical sense, "All" does not refer to "cake" and "Each" does not refer to "students"; these pronouns refer to a conceptual organization of the noun they are linked to via preposition ("of" in both cases) rather than literally to the nouns themselves.
"All" refers to the conceptual entirety of the cake, and "Each" refers individually to every student that makes up the collective "students".
In other words, the nouns that these pronouns directly refer to - "the entirety of the cake" and each "student" within "students" - do not actually appear in the sentence.
We hope this helps.
All the best!
Experts' Global Team