prejacents

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

See all 5 meanings of prejacent