"clifto" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
I don't look this stuff up for fun, but if you doubt all this and want to
see some parallel examples, I'll dig out my grammar books. They have some
good ones.

Actually, I'd love that. I saw these constructs so often in my early
reading that they became ingrained; if I've missed something I wanna know.

--
If you really believe carbon dioxide causes global warming,
you should stop exhaling.

Hokay. As I said, the construction is uncommon but you'll recognize these
familiar examples:

(From The American Heritage Book of English Usage, "Absolute Construction"):

"No other business arising, the meeting was adjourned."
"The paint now dry, we brought the furniture out on the deck."
"The truck finally loaded, they said goodbye to their neighbors and drove
off."
"The horse loped across the yard, her foal trailing behind her."
"The picnic is scheduled for Saturday, weather permitting."
"Barring bad weather, we plan to go to the beach tomorrow."
"All things considered, it's not a bad idea."

Note that in some of these, the ones about the horse and her foal and the
one about the picnic, the absolute phrase is almost, but not quite,
incidental. The foal did not restrict the horse from loping across the yard,
so far as we can tell. The weather may decide if we have the picnic, but it
doesn't change the fact that the picnic is scheduled for Saturday.

We brought the furniture out on the deck at least partly because the paint
was dry. We would not have done so if it wasn't, probably, so the dryness of
the paint in this case is logically (but not grammatically) restrictive. The
good idea is logically, but not grammatically, connected to the idea that we
have considered all things. It still would have been a good idea if we had
not considered all things, in all likelihood, but the sentence is ambiguous
on this point.

Is it clearing up? The nominative absolute allows a variety of logical
connections between the phrase and the clause.

(Here's one I picked up online):

"High heels clattering on the pavement, the angry women marched toward the
mayor's office."

The women were marching regardless of whether their heels were clattering.

I hope this is enough to satisfy what you're looking for. I should point out
that the nominative absolute is a slightly controversial issue to
grammarians, but it may appear that way because some don't like the fact
that it's derived from Latin, in which the parallel to the English
nominative absolute is the "ablative absolute," and it really works better
in Latin than in English.

In English, the construction has always been rare. Linguists say it started
when early literary writers tried to adopt Latin constructions. John Milton
used in heavily in _Paradise Lost_. But it has never, otherwise, been
common.

Why the FFs used it is a good question. It's a literary device whose meaning
depends on context. But the 2nd has no context. My guess, after years of
studying it, is that it was an intentional ambiguity.

You probably noticed that Gunner made a point of the commas, which many
writers have done over the years. The commas would be an issue if the
grammatical question was whether the phrase is restrictive or not. But
that's not the issue. Absolute constructions -- the nominative absolute, in
this case -- have no grammatical relationship to the rest of their
sentences. They have various logical connections but "absolute" means they
are grammatically self-contained, or not connected. Once it's absolute,
there is no "restrictive" or "unrestrictive."

The point is that the commas don't matter. If the sentence of the 2nd
Amendment were written today, we would not use the first comma, but the
meaning would be identical to the original. The use of such "ear-based"
commas has declined but the meaning remains the same.

I have some definitions of nominative absolute that may help but I hope the
examples clear it up.

--
Ed Huntress