1. Guns and Grammar: Determining what the Second ... - English

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Baron, Language and Law, 1. Guns and grammar, 6But that’s not all. Apparently, some copies of the Second Amendment sent tosome of the states for ratification had a different number of commas from the“official” version as printed by the federal government (Van Alstyne 2007). The textof the Second Amendment quoted in Parker contains only the first two commas, notthe third. But that should pose no problem, even for a strict constructionist.Punctuation only loosely correlated with meaning in the eighteenth century, and itwould not be an exaggeration to claim that the Second Amendment would mean thesame thing—not just when it was written but today as well—whether it had one,two, or three commas, or none at all.Commentators have paid more attention to the Second Amendment’s syntaxthan to its punctuation. The amendment begins with what grammarians call anabsolute phrase: “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a freestate….” Judge Silberman doesn’t call the “prefatory” phrase an absolute, but hisargument tracks that of Nelson Lund in his own discussion of the SecondAmendment’s “preambulatory” absolute (Lund 2007). Lund, whose expertise is law,not language, and who filed an amicus brief supporting an individual rightsinterpretation, insists that an absolute is grammatically independent from asentence’s main clause, and so can have no impact on the meaning of that sentence.Commenting during oral arguments in Heller, Justice Kennedy similarlydisconnected the two halves of the amendment, though without dismissing theimportance of a militia:[T]here is an interpretation of the Second Amendment . . . thatconforms the two clauses and in effect delinks them. . . . Theamendment says we reaffirm the right to have a militia, we’veestablished it, but in addition, there is a right to bear arms.”[Supreme Court 2008, 5-6]But this line of reasoning mistakes the meaning of grammatical independence.Although it is true that the second comma divides the sentence syntactically, it iscertainly not the case that such punctuation creates semantic or even syntacticindependence. And the comma does not divide the unimportant from the significantparts of a sentence, either in the eighteenth century or today. An examination ofabsolute constructions in English shows that, pace Justice Kennedy, they shouldnever be delinked.So what’s an absolute when it’s at home? The grammarian C. T. Onions writes that a phrase is called absolute “[Lat.,absolutus = free] because…it seems to be free of the rest of the sentence” (Onions1904, 66; emphasis added). Seems is the operative word here. Grammaticalindependence is not semantic independence. The opposite of independence, ingrammar is also called governance, and that in turn is a reference to one wordcontrolling the grammatical case of another. As Bishop Lowth put it in his influential
Baron, Language and Law, 1. Guns and grammar, 7grammar of 1762, “Regimen, or government, is when a word causeth a followingword to be in some case, or mode” (Lowth 1762, 95).The grammarian Robert Lowth’s explanation of syntactic “government”: a wordthat controls the case of another word (from A short introduction to Englishgrammar, 176)In Lowth’s day, English absolutes took the nominative case, sometimes alsocalled the ungoverned case, and so they appeared to be grammatically independent.But that’s because Modern English nouns had lost most case markings. In OldEnglish, the nouns in absolutes took the dative case (cf. the Latin ablative absolute),marking the subordination of the absolute to the main clause of the sentence. Thegrammatical independence of the absolute is merely apparent, not real, the accidentof a morphological change, not a syntactic or semantic one. Henry Fowler (1906,228) succinctly underscores the distinction between grammatical and semanticindependence in pointing out the clear semantic connection that frequently existseven between independent sentences separated by a full stop: “There aregrammatical dependence, and dependence of thought.”William Ward (1767, 145) shows just how important the absolute is when hecalls it the equivalent of a whole sentence, and he discusses absolutes both in termsof their internal dependence and their dependence on the rest of the sentence. GooldBrown, compiler of a comprehensive grammar, similarly makes clear that theabsolute “is often equivalent to a dependent clause commencing with when, while,if, since, or because.” (1880, 536). Lyndley Murray (1795, 162-63), whose grammarwas widely used in American schools, demonstrates the obvious cause-and-effectfunction of the absolute, even as it is “separated by commas from the body of thesentence,” with this example: “His father dying, he succeeded to the estate.” InMurray’s example, the effect cannot easily be “delinked” from the cause.Above: William Ward (1767) describes the absolute as the “equivalent to a wholeSentence.” Below: Lyndley Murray (1795), in his tenth rule of syntax, demonstratesthe clear cause-and-effect function of the absolute: “His father dying, he succeededto the estate.” In this example, the effect cannot be “delinked” from the cause.
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