A shift toward determinate sentencing, Mr. Weisberg pointed out, has sharply reduced the ability of judges to impose lighter punishment, while strengthening the resolve of prosecutors who, in a case like Mr. Polanski's, cut tougher deals because they are backed by heavier and more definite sentences for each count, and a lessened opportunity to get probation.
This is a normal practice in much of China, where cancer is seen not as something to be fought and defeated but as a definite death sentence.
SEC rules now require prospectuses to be written in "plain English" complying with the principles of short sentences; definite, concrete, everyday words; active voice; tabular presentation or bullet lists for complex material, whenever possible; no legal jargon or highly technical business terms; and no multiple negatives.
This facilitates a response to versions of the Fregean puzzle involving definite descriptions, because sentences with co-designating definite descriptions have different contents, in virtue of the different conditions involved.
A prison sentence is definite.
Thus tweaked, Russell's analysis is that the use of a definite description in a sentence involves an existence claim, a uniqueness claim, and a maximality claim.
In Russell's view, philosophers like Meinong had been misled by the surface grammatical form of sentences containing definite descriptions.
First, some philosophers simply deny that the paraphrases properly capture the meaning of sentences with definite descriptions, simply on the grounds that the meaning of a proper name like "Pegasus" is just less specific than the meaning of the definite description "the flying horse of Greek mythology".
Not definitive, just definite.
This sentence contains the definite NP "his son", which in its turn contains the pronoun "his", and the focus particle "too".
Thus, whenever a sentence containing a definite description is ontologically committed to some entity satisfying the description, so will be the regimented sentence that results from applying Russell's theory of descriptions (which was endorsed by Quine).
