Being-clauses in Historical Corpora and the US Second Amendment

Abstract

The gun control debate in the US revolves around the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Due to over two hundred years of language change, this Amendment is confusing and ungrammatical for modern readers. Analysts of the Amendment have taken into account the etymology of many of its words, but the present study is the first to examine the syntactic changes that have caused the Amendment's current ungrammaticality, and to assess the syntactic interpretations of the Amendment that were available at the time of its writing. The present study rejects most of the readings of the Amendment previously suggested by legal scholars and journalists, and assesses the remaining interpretations according to their probability.