Immediate Constituent Analysis (IC Analysis) Immediate Constituent Analysis is typically analytic and was developed with a view to working out a scientific discovery procedure to find out about the basic units of linguistics. The principle underlying theory is to cut a sentence into smaller parts till the smallest unit (ultimate constituent), the morpheme, is reached. The aim of Immediate Constituent Analysis is to analyse each utterance and each constituent into maximally independent sequences. The ultimate constituents are the smallest meaningful units which any given constriction can be broken down to, consisting of a morpheme at the morphological level and a word at the syntactic level. This term was introduced by Bloomfield, who illustrated the way in which it was possible to take a sentence (he chose Poor John and ran away) and split it up into two immediate constituents (Poor John and ran away), these being in turn analysable into further constituents (Poor and John, and ran away). In other words, a sentence is seen not as a sequence or a "string" of elements, Poor + John + ran + away, but as being made up of "layers" of constituents, each cutting point, or "node' in the diagram being given on identifying label. This was made clear in the form of a "tree diagram", such as: NO INSTANCES OF IC TREE DIAGRAM
4 5 At first, at the initial emphasis, it is done pure segmentation, simply dividing the sentence into its constituent/segment/part/onder-deel elements without knowing what these elements were. The principle was that we take a sentence and cut it into two and then cut those parts into two and continue with this segmentation until we reach the smallest units, the morphemes. See this three-word sentence which allows three possible segmentations: John ran away. We may make three segmentations: John ran Away. John Ran away John ran Away By seeing these variation it can be seen the principle of regularity of substitutability by comparing these two sentences: John ran away. Mary likes potatoes. John and mary belong to the same parts of speech as Noun, ran and likes also belong to the same class as Verb so it can be interchangable or subtitutable: John likes Potatoes Mary Ran away
But it can be made like these examples since away and potatoes belong to different parts of speech; away is adverb and potatoes is noun. It can not be made like these: *Mary likes away. *John ran potatoes. In addition, Contrasting terms in (structural) LINGUISTICS. Every item of language has a paradigmatic relationship with every other item which can be substituted for it (such as cat with dog), and a syntagmatic relationship with items which occur within the same construction (for example, in The cat sat on the mat, cat with the and sat on the mat). The relationships are like axes, as shown in the accompanying diagram. On the lexical level, paradigmatic contrasts indicate which words are likely to belong to the same word class (part of speech): cat, dog, parrot in the diagram are all nouns, sat, slept, perched are all verbs. Syntagmatic relations between words enable one to build up a picture of co-occurrence restrictions within SYNTAX, for example, the verbs hit, kick have to be followed by a noun (Paul hit the wall, not *Paul hit), but sleep, doze do not normally do so (Peter slept, not *Peter slept the bed). On the semantic level, paradigmatic substitutions allow items from a semantic set to be grouped together, for example Angela came on Tuesday (Wednesday, Thursday, etc.). PLEASE MAKE SENTENCES PARADIGMATICALLY : NO John ran away. (N) (V) (Adv) NO Mary likes potatoes (N) (V) (N)
NO Julia was late (N) (V) (Adj) (in fact, sometimes it seems difficult to divide into two, and in some cases division into three or more parts is allowed, but in general the divison is binary. See a more than binary construction: ABIGUOUS CASES: 4
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4 5 6 NEXT EXERCISE: MAKE THE IC ANALYSIS OF THESE AMBIGUOUS SENTENCES: NO LIST OF SENTENCES I called her dog. We saw a group of old men and women. The thing that bothered Ahmed was hiding under the table 4 We are frying chickens 5 I bought many green grapes and pears. 7