The word 绳之以法 is constructed from the verb 绳 (meaning to restrain or punish), the object pronoun 之 (referring to the person being acted upon), the preposition 以 (meaning with or by), and the noun 法 (meaning law), arranged in a classical Chinese syntactic order where the verb is followed by its object and then the instrumental phrase, resulting in a literal sense of "to punish them with law".