[Grammar] "Ours was a very happy marriage."

[nininaz]

As we know, 'ours' is a pronoun and we use pronoun to avoid repeating noun, and pronoun always refers to its antecedent, but in the following example there is no antecedent.
Could anyone explain why we use pronoun here ?
Can we use 'Our marriage was a very happy one" or 'Our marriage was a very happy mariage'.

"Ours was a very happy marriage."

 

[nininaz]

If you weren't satisfied with my response, you could have asked a follow-up question rather than posting the same question, with the same misuse of 'following', here.

Please don't take it offense! But because of my poor English, I couldn't understand what you said.It was so hard to understand it.


Thanks anyway for your respond.

 

[Tdol]

We were happily married would work without any repetition.

 

[PaulMatthews]

"Ours is a very happy marriage".

I'd say that "ours" does have an antecedent, i.e. the noun "marriage" which occurs later in the clause, so we understand "ours" to mean "our marriage". Other than the location of the antecedent, it's really no different to "Kim and Ed have a difficult marriage, but I'm please to say that ours is very happy", where again "ours" has "marriage" as antecedent.

 

[PaulMatthews]

We generally use the term "antecedent" whether it precedes or follows the pronoun.

 

[emsr2d2]

The info HERE might be of interest, particularly "Ensure your pronouns have an unambiguous antecedent that is both before and near the pronoun" (page 1), and "... make sure the antecedent comes first" (page 2, under "Problem 2: Anticipatory Reference").

 

[PaulMatthews]

That's fine as far as it goes. But the fact is that the antecedent does not always come first as the OP's example shows. Consider also examples like "When he had finished eating, John quickly left the table" and "If he hurts himself, Ed will only blame you" which are grammatically fine and cause no ambiguity. There is nothing at all wrong with using the term "antecedent" for the NPs in those examples.

 

[PaulMatthews]

I don't agree. To use a word that means 'something that goes before' of something that goes after seems a little perverse to me.
Why don't we just use 'referent'?

You can disagree as much as you like, but the fact is that we use the term antecedent. Don't ask me why; it just seems to have become normal practice.


Consider also the preposition "ago"; it usually occurs after its complement, but we still call it a preposition, not a postposition.