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Linguistics

Notes and linguistic historian, has become a major concern of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists,
logicians, communication theorists and even biologists.
It would not be possible even in a book devoted entirely to the subject, to give a complete account of
this development. Hence only a brief discussion on various systems or methods or procedures of
syntactic analysis known as ‘syntactic models’ is given in the following pages.
29.2 Immediate Constituent Analysis

Immediate Constituent Analysis is one of the strong methods of analysing a sentence linguistically.
It aims at finding out the ultimate constituents of a sentence and their relationship with one another.
The constituents are nothing but the morphemes or groups of morphemes which, when structured
into successive component, form utterances (sentences). It is the discovery of these constituents
which has come to be known as Immediate Constituent Analysis or IC analysis in short. This term
(immediate constituents) was introduced by Bloomfield in 1939, who illustrated the way in which
it was possible to take a sentence (Poor John 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 and away). So 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 points, or ‘note’ in the
diagram being given an identifying label. This was made quite clear in the form of a ‘tree diagram’
such as
X

Y Z

POOR JOHN RAN AWAY
(IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENTS AS ANALYSED BY BLOOMFIELD)

POOR JOHN RAN AWAY

POOR JOHN RAN AWAY

POOR JOHN RAN AWAY

OR SENTENCE POOR JOHN RAN AWAY

ADJECTIVE NOUN VERB PARTICLE
SUBJECT PREDICATE

ADJECTIVE NOUN VERB PARTICLE SUBJECT PREDICATE

POOR JOHN RAN AWAY SENTENCE

So the IC analysis attempts to break down constituents into subparts that are in some sense
grammatically relevant. In this analysis we ask questions : what are the constituents of paragraph ?
And how are they organized ?
The above sentence is made up of four morphs (Let us ignore, for the present, the fact that ran is a
composite of run plus PAST), which may be defined as the minimum significant, syntactic units :
poor John ran away
1 2 3 4

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