In linguistics, Immediate constituent analysis or IC Analysis is a method of sentence analysis first explicitly introduced by American linguist Leonard Bloomfield in his book Languagein 1933. It is a major feature of Bloomfieldian structuralist linguistics.
In IC analysis, a sentence is divided up into major divisions or "immediate constituents", and these constituents are in turn divided into further immediate constituents, and this process continues until irreducible constituents are reached, i.e., until each constituent consists of only a word or meaningful part of a word. The end result of IC analysis is often presented in a visual diagrammatic form that reveals the hierarchical immediate constituent structure of a sentence. For sentences whose structures are unusual, this diagramming may become excessively complex; in such cases verbal description is used.
For example, the sentence "The girl is happy" can be divided into immediate constituents "The girl" and "is happy". These in turn can be analyzed into immediate constituents (the+girl) and (is+happy), and so on. Bloomfield doesn't give any special technique to detect immediate constituents, rather appeals to the native speaker's intuition.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immediate_constituent_analysis-16.10.2011
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