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Grammarians Parse the Second Amendment

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court is expected to interpret the meaning of the Second Amendment, which says, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." When it does, John McIntyre hopes that the justices keep in mind "the understanding of English grammar prevalent among the Latinate-minded Founders."

McIntyre speaks as one learned not in law but in language. He is a copy editor at the Baltimore Sun and author of the blog You Don't Say, where he writes about writing, grammar and usage. The Second Amendment's opening phrase, he argues, is an absolute, one that governs the rest of the sentence. "The right to bear arms therefore has a direct connection to the establishment of a militia," he says.

His interpretation finds an ally in Dennis Baron, the University of Illinois linguistics professor who writes the blog The Web of Language. Baron was one of several linguistics professors who filed an amicus brief in Heller. The brief argued that the "absolute construction" of the militia clause necessarily melds to it the second clause, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." This was the grammatical rule the framers would have understood, Baron argues, and while the Supreme Court may end up parsing the Second Amendment differently:

it risks calling down the wrath of Robert Lowth, Bishop of London, the royalist sympathizer Lindley Murray, and the rabid federalist Noah Webster, whose political opinions may have differed, but whose grammatical analysis informed the eighteenth century and the documents, like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, that it generated.

Copy editor McIntyre concludes that, not being a lawyer, he is "unable to say whether this constitutional context grants residents of the District of Columbia a right to keep an arsenal of firearms under the bed." It will be interesting, nonetheless, "to see what the exponents on the court of Original Intent will make of all this."

Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on March 24, 2008 at 09:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Comments

It sounds to me like you're reading too much into the terminology. As the linguists well know, but conveniently neglect to mention, there is nothing "absolute" (in the standard English sense of the word) about an "absolute clause." That's just a linguistic term for an adverbial clause whose verb is either omitted or takes the form of a participle. Absolutes don't have any special powers or "meld" themselves to adjoining clauses any differently than any other subordinate clauses do. All this begs the question of why the linguists saw fit to make such a big deal about a term them knew described only the internal structure of the subordinate clause, and not its syntactic or semantic relationship to the main one.

Put differently, the preamble to the Second Amendment could just as easily have been written without an absolute, e.g.:

Given that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

In that case, the syntactic and semantic relationships between the two clauses would be exactly the same, as would the popular debate over what relationship, if any, a "well-regulated militia" has to "the right of the people to keep and bear arms." The only difference would be that since the verb was inflected, a group of disingenuous linguists would not have been able to use a word like "absolute" to trick the nonlinguist public into believing that the subordinate clause had some magical, super-syntactic powers that we all know typical subordinate clauses do not.

Posted by: Xrlq | Mar 24, 2008 2:48:50 PM

The comma is irrelevant because the militia is the entirety of the people in arms. The militia being the people, it is necessary for people to have the right to keep and bear arms so all the people can be in arms.

Posted by: gorak | Mar 30, 2008 12:05:03 PM

If any linguist referred to the element preceding the comma in the 2A as a clause, you can discount everything they say past that. It is not a clause. It is a phrase. I don't expect normal human beings to know the difference, but linguists do. And it is called an absolutive (not an absolute) because in Latin, it would have been marked with the ablative of the absolute.

Absolutives are, by definition, non-restrictive elements. They do not restrict or modify the main clause.

Posted by: rightwingprof | Mar 31, 2008 8:35:13 AM

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