prejacent
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
20
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
3
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
adj
noun
A proposition laid out previously; a proposition from which another proposition is inferred.
noun
The propositional content with which a scope-taking operator (such as a modal, a focus particle like only, or an exhaustivity operator) combines.
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "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)."
- "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"
- "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."
- "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’"
- "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."
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”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: prejacent, praeiacens