Difference between revisions of "Sentence (meanings)"

Revision as of 19:31, 14 January 2014

This page is an account of the different meanings, and how they developed, of sentence. AWE also has articles on

the grammatical concept of sentence; and

the spelling of sentence

• Sentence began as an abstract noun (sententia, plural sententiae) formed from the Latin verb sentire 'to feel'. or 'to hold an opinion. So a sentence was originally an opinion. This meaning became obsolete in the Early Modern English period.

A famous quotation from the Roman author Terence reads "quot homines tot sententiae" (Phormio, l. 454): 'there are as amny opinions as there are people'. The line continues "suo’ quoique mos, 'to every one his own way'.

• • From 'opinion' it came to mean 'a judgement', or 'an authoritative opinion' issued by a respected person to decide a matter at issue.
  • Until well into the nineteenth century, a sentence could be any decision by a court of law.
    • Now, however, the term is only normally used for a decision about the punishment to be imposed on someone found guilty by the verdict. (In a criminal case, a verdict, from Old French veir 'true' dit 'said', is the decision, originally by a jury and now often by a judge, with or without a jury, as to the guilt of the person accused of the crime. A sentence is the appropriate punishment decided by a judge to be inflicted on the guilty person. Don't confuse 'verdict' and 'sentence'.) This meaning gives us the verb 'to sentence', whose only current use in normal English is 'to condem,n to a punishment', 'to announce the court's [i.e. the judge's] decision as to punishment of a convicted person'.