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Keeping and Bearing Arms in Czech

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Taming the Corpus

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Abstract

Determining the plain or primary meaning of words in legal language is crucial to compliance with and enforcement of laws, but also controversial if the methods used are subjective and unsystematic. Corpus linguistics is a potential remedy. This chapter uses corpus analysis to compare the usage of the Czech noun zbraň (weapon), verbs držet (keep) and nosit (bear), and adjectives bezúhonný (upstanding) and spolehlivý (reliable) in Czech gun law against their usage in wider discourse. The results suggest a marked misalignment between the two usages, with the words taking on connotations at law that would not be self-evident. Although the population of gun owners in the Czech Republic is small, the potential cost of misunderstanding the key terms of gun law has risen with the attempt in 2017 to create a constitutional right to keep and bear arms to assist the state in protecting national security.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Martin Plíšek, from the TOP 09 party, in the Chamber of Deputies, April 12, 2017, at http://www.psp.cz/eknih/2013ps/stenprot/056schuz/s056213.htm#r2. The amendment itself anticipated follow-up passage of a statute to limit the right and clarify conditions for its exercise.

  2. 2.

    In the Czech National Corpus (SYN v.5), a common translation of the second clause of the Second Amendment, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” is “právo lidu držet a nosit zbraně nesmí být proto omezováno” (13 hits). A variant of this is “právo lidu držet a nosit zbraně nesmí být porušeno” (Mladá fronta DNES, April 18, 2007.) Another uses mít (to have) in place of držet: “nebudiž dotčeno právo lidu mít a nosit zbraň” (Literární noviny, 1/2013).

  3. 3.

    See also https://zbranekvalitne.cz/zbrojni-prukaz/nauka-o-zbranich for a helpful overview of the Czech terms for gun components.

  4. 4.

    When the lemma for a noun or adjective has been used in a query, it will be indicated in the results table with an asterisk (*).

  5. 5.

    With logDice, the theoretical maximum score is 14, if all occurrences in a corpus of word X co-occur with word Y, and vice-versa. Scores are normally below 10. See Rychlý (2008). MI scores are more sensitive to the size of the corpus and tend to give high scores to words that may occur infrequently (Baker, 2006).

  6. 6.

    Category B is based on the taxonomy in the European Union’s Firearms Directive and covers repeating or semiautomatic weapons.

  7. 7.

    That this does arise and does cause confusion is attested to by the long thread, running intermittently from November 2004 to March 2016, on an online gun discussion board at http://www.strelectvi.cz/forum/povoleni-k-nabyti-drzeni-noseni-a-registrace-dle-ucelu-t360.html.

  8. 8.

    http://www.strelectvi.cz/forum/post432712.html#p432712.

  9. 9.

    Usnesení výboru pro obranu a bezpečnost z 61. schůze dne 16. ledna 2002 [decision of the committee for defense and security from its 61st meeting on January 16, 2002], at http://www.psp.cz/doc/pdf/00/05/69/00056978.pdf.

  10. 10.

    See the exchange between “Marthy” and “MarK” on June 8, 2007, at http://www.strelectvi.cz/forum/muze-ochranka-viditelne-neskryte-nosit-zbran-t3503.html. “MarK” was soon set straight by another contributor, “Steiner,” but many other posts in the thread suggest widespread uncertainty about what constitutes keeping and bearing at law. The thread continued into June 2014, with 164 posts.

  11. 11.

    I also ran the collocations on a window span of −3 to +3, with negligible differences in the word rankings and scores.

  12. 12.

    One of the authors of those articles, Judge Richard Posner of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, was also the author of an opinion who tried to use a Google search to arrive at the plain meaning of the verb “to harbor.” For a critique of that method, see Kilgarriff (2007).

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Bills and Sponsor Reports

Promulgated Acts

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Drake University, Des Moines, IA, USA

    Kieran Williams

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  1. Kieran Williams
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Correspondence to Kieran Williams .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Slavic Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

    Masako Fidler

  2. Institute of the Czech National Corpus, Charles University, Prague 1, Czech Republic

    Václav Cvrček

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Williams, K. (2018). Keeping and Bearing Arms in Czech. In: Fidler, M., Cvrček, V. (eds) Taming the Corpus. Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98017-1_8

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