Word.ws English Dictionary

prejacent

prejacent adjective: existing previously, preexistent.

Adjective

prejacent

  1. Existing previously, preexistent.
    • 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
    • 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
  2. (archaic) Before; 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 back1991, Myron Spain, The Production of Human Speech, page 166
  3. Laid 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...

Noun

prejacent (plural prejacents)

  1. A 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. The propositional content with which a scope-taking operator (such as a modal, a focus particle like only, or an exhaustivity operator) combines.
    • 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...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
    • 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...

Forms of prejacent

pluralprejacents

Origin of prejacent

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”).

Words formed from prejacent

Questions about prejacent

What does prejacent mean?
Prejacent means existing previously, preexistent.
What part of speech is prejacent?
Prejacent can be an adjective or a noun.

Words near prejacent in the dictionary

  1. preisingerite
  2. preisolate
  3. preisolation
  4. preiswerkite
  5. prejac
  6. prejacent
  7. prejacently
  8. prejacents
  9. prejacs
  10. Prejean
  11. Prejeans

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: prejacent (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “prejacent.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/prejacent. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.