prejacent

English

Etymology

Multiple origins. Borrowed from Middle French prejacent (“previously existing”) during the sixteenth century. Also attested in twelfth century British sources, from post-classical Latin praeiacens (“situated before”).

Adjective

prejacent

1. Existing previously, preexistent.
   • 1631, William Twisse, A Discovery of D. Jacksons Vanitie‎^[1], page 45:

     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.

   • 1999, Philip Lyndon Reynolds, Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology‎^[2], page 406:

     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).

2. (archaic, now rare) Before; situated in front.
   • 1991, Myron Spain, The Production of Human Speech, page 166:

     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

3. (logic, of a proposition) Laid out earlier, prior.
   • 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:

     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]] ([[NP]]^W–S) ([[VP]]^W)=0.

Noun

prejacent (plural prejacents)

1. (philosophy, logic, linguistics) A proposition laid out previously; a proposition from which another proposition is inferred.
   • 1979 [c. 1499], Norman Kretzman, Logica Magna, translation of original by Pauli Veneti, pages 27–29:

     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’

   • 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:

     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.

References

• “prejacent, adj. (and n.).”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, March 2007.