1923 Jrnl. Amer. Inst. Criminal Law & Criminol. 14 246 The modern psychopathic–sociological clinic..should have the leading role both in the pre-sentence examination of the offender and in the question of his disposition.

1940 Fed. Suppl. 31 737/1 It appears from such testimony that the District Judge had adopted the practice of holding what was termed a ‘Pre-Sentence Hearing’ in cases in which he had been advised that the defendants were going to plead guilty.

1957 Encycl. Brit. VI. 719/2 Under the federal rules of criminal procedure and the law of a few states, a presentence investigation by the probation service and a report to the trial judge must be made.

1979 Arizona Daily Star 1 Apr. a8/2 As Raymond said in a pre-sentence interview: ‘My closest friends are my mother and my brothers. They're the only people I can trust.’

1995 Hanover (Ont.) Post 18 July a3/4 Mr. Caughy appeared last Monday in Ontario Court, Provincial Division... A presentence report was ordered for Sept. 20.

1965 N. Chomsky Aspects Theory Syntax ii. 102 Sentence Adverbials which form a ‘pre-Sentence’ unit in the underlying structure.

1965 N. Chomsky Aspects Theory Syntax iv. 148 Verbs are strictly subcategorized into Intransitives, Transitives, pre-Adjectival, pre-Sentence, etc.

1990 J. Harris Early Lang. Devel. vii. 130 One [method] referred to as Developmental Sentence Types (DST) is designed to help the teacher or therapist classify pre-sentence utterances.

1997 Jrnl. Pragmatics 27 418 A pre-sentence operator..is conceptualized as present in the deep structure tree..and is a determinant of the transformation which produces..the surface level.

1940 M. M. Bryant & J. R. Aiken Psychol. of Eng. iv. 33 These primitive ‘pre-sentences’ came to be broken up.

1965 Language 41 459 Let us call these sequences of morphemes presentences when they label nonsurface P-markers.

1983 Amer. Speech 58 137 These three basic paraphrases vary somewhat, depending on the adverb, thus complicating any neat transformational derivation of sentence adverbs from underlying presentences; but they serve to separate three kinds of disjuncts.