What is IC analysis? Exemplify IC analysis through tree diagrams and determine its limitations.
Immediate constituent analysis, also known as IC analysis in linguistics, is a method of grammatical analysis that divides sentences into sequential levels, or elements, until the final level, each element consists of only one word or meaningful part of the word. An element is any world or construction that enters into some large construction. The first of the instant elements in the sentence “The old man has fled” will be between “The old man” and “has fled”. The immediate elements of “the old man” are “the” and “old man”. The next level is divided into “old” and “man”. Now, we cannot further divide the NP (The old man) since we have separated every constituent of the NP. Such a kind of analysis is simply called IC analysis. The term was coined by the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield in 1933, although the underlying principle is common both to the traditional practice of parsing and to many modern systems of grammatical analysis.
IC analysis with a tree diagram
In phrase structure grammar, IC analysis divides a sentence into main parts or immediate elements, and these elements are further divided into immediate elements. The process continues until irreducible elements are reached, for example, until each element consists of only one word or a meaningful part of a word. Let’s analyze the following tree diagram:
The above tree diagram divides the whole sentence into two immediate constituents or parts – “this tree” and “illustrates IC-analysis according to the constituency relation”; these two constituents are further divided into the immediate constituents “this” and “tree” and “illustrates IC-analysis” and “according to the constituency relation”. In detail, we can illustrate the above tree diagram in the following way:
First step: S (sentence) is divided into two parts or constituents such as NP (this tree) and VP (“illustrates IC-analysis according to the constituency relation”).
Second step: NP is divided into two constituents such as D (this) and N (tree)
Third step: VP is divided into two parts such as VP (illustrates IC analysis) and PP1 (according to the constituency relation).
Fourth step: VP is divided into parts such as V (illustrates) and N (IC analysis).
Fifth step: PP1 is divided into two parts such as P1 (according) and PP2 (to the constituency relation).
Sixth step: PP2 is divided into two parts P2 (to) and NP (the constituency relation).
Seventh step: NP is divided into three parts D (the) A (constituency) and N (relation).
So, after analyzing the immediate constituents of the sentence “This tree illustrates IC analysis according to the constituency relation”, each meaningful element of the sentence has reached its final level.
N:B: S = sentence, NP = noun phrase, VP = verbal phrase, D = determiner, N = noun, PP1 = prepositional phrase one, P1= phrase one, PP2 = prepositional phrase two, P2 = preposition, and A = adjective.
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