"preceding word" is a correct and usable phrase in written English.
It can be used to refer to a word that comes before another word in a sentence. For example, "He was warned about the consequences of his actions by the preceding word."
3An asterisk indicates that a preceding word is unattested but has been deduced from attested derivatives.
(The lovely term "anaphoric", by the way, means "referring to or standing for a preceding word or group of words").
In a slide projection piece by Pierre Bismuth called "Mute and Noisy," each of 81 slides shows a handprinted word synonymous with the preceding word.
Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word.
The time combining form was pioneered in party time and was popularized by TV's Bob Smith in the late 1940's with "Hi, kids -- it's Howdy Doody time!" The time turns the preceding word or phrase into a modifier, thereby weakening put up or shut up.
This game requires players to generate a word that begins with the last syllable of the preceding word.
Fowler said that, "the colon... has acquired a special function, that of delivering the goods that have been invoiced in the preceding words".
The purpose of a language model (LM) employed in an ASR system is to provide the probability of a word given the history of its preceding words.
In case the target word locates at the beginning or the end of the example sentence, the two following or preceding words of the target word are used instead.
The language model in most state-of-the-art LVCSR systems is still the N-gram, which assigns probability to the next word based on only the N−1 preceding words [64].
Results from the two experiments showed that animacy-violated sentences with no plausible non-surface interpretation elicited the same P600 effect as both types of role-reversed sentences; additionally, semantically anomalous target words elicited no N400 effects when they were strongly semantically related to the preceding words, regardless of the presence of animacy violations.
