prejacent

1. Existing previously, preexistent.

   Again, to be created from nothing is not to have been formed from prejacent matter (although in another sense, the newly created body is made from matter).

   1999, Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology, page 406

   1 more example

   The Platonickes and Stoicks acknowledged a divine understandinge to have made the world, but out of prejacent matter, which they conccaved to be eternall, and to acknowledge no maker.

   1631, William Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanitie, page 45

2. archaicBefore; situated in front.

   Like the vowels, if you pronounce a given consonant farther backward or forward than the location per the chart, then you probably pronounce its prejacent chart neighbor ahead of that location and its postjacent chart neighbor further back

   1991, Myron Spain, The Production of Human Speech, page 166

3. human sciencesLaid out earlier, prior.

   So, every exception set S that is not a subset of C(={b}) makes the prejacent statement false, i.e. makes it so that some (NPᵂ–S) (VPᵂ)=0.

   2013, John Gajewski, “An analogy between a connected exceptive phrase and polarity items”, in Eva Csipak, Regine Eckardt, Mingya Liu, editors, Beyond ‘Any’ and ‘Ever’: New Explorations in Negative Polarity, page 196

plural prejacents

1. human sciencesA proposition laid out previously; a proposition from which another proposition is inferred.

   The subject of the prejacent and its exclusive must be one and the same (I grant that), but the subject of the prejacent ‘every man is a man’ is just ‘man’

   1979 [c. 1499], Norman Kretzman, Logica Magna, translation of original by Pauli Veneti, pages 27–29

2. human sciencesThe propositional content with which a scope-taking operator (such as a modal, a focus particle like only, or an exhaustivity operator) combines.

   The factual modal k’a requires the speaker to have indirect inferential evidence for the prejacent, while the content modal lákw7a requires the speaker to have sensory, non-visual evidence for the prejacent. Only lákw7a allows the speaker to believe that the prejacent is false.

   2016, Lisa Matthewson, “Modality”, in Maria Aloni, Paul Dekker, editors, The Cambridge Handbook of Formal Semantics (Cambridge Handbooks in Language and Linguistics), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →DOI, →ISBN, page 539

   1 more example

   I have suggested elsewhere (Horn 1992: 182-83) that this case requires an invocation of the notion of explicature or pragmatic enrichment […] so that the prejacent, while not constituting part of the linguistic meaning contributed by only, enters into the determination of what is said and hence into the enriched propositional content.

   1997, Laurence Horn, “Negative polarity and the dynamics of vertical inference”, in Danielle Forget, Paul Hirschbühler, France Martineau, María Luisa Rivero, editors, Negation and Polarity, page 176