Script:
Good morning everyone! Today, we are going to learn the Immediate Constituents
(IC) analysis of sentences.
What is IC Analysis?
IC analysis is a short form of immediate constituents’ analysis of sentences. It is the
system of analyzing a sentence by getting the immediate constituents of a particular
sentence or dividing a sentence into the sections until we get the smallest IC’s or
immediate constituents of that particular sentence. This analysis system is used to
study the syntax or sentence pattern.
Syntax is a branch of linguistics in where the sentence pattern of different languages,
the form of sentences and the importance of words and their roots are analyzed and
studied.
So, IC analysis is a process of analyzing a sentence by dividing it into various parts –
small parts.
IC analysis is a system of grammatical analysis that divides sentences into
successive layers, or constituents, until, in the final layer each constituent consists of
only a word or meaningful part of word.
Example:
”THE OLD MAN Ran away”
The first division into immediate constituents would be between “the old man” and
“ran away”. The immediate constituents of the old man are “the” and ”old man”. at
the next level “old man” is divided into “old” and “man.”
The term was introduced by the United States linguist Leonard Bloomfield in 1993,
though the underlying principle is common both to the traditional practice of parsing
and to many modern systems of grammatical analysis.
Immediate constituent analysis was developed further by Rulon Wells.
The process reached a full-blown strategy for analyzing sentence structure in the
early works of Noam Chomsky.
Most tree structures employed to represent the syntactic structure of sentences are
products of some form of IC-analysis
The process and result of IC-analysis can, however, vary greatly based upon
whether one chooses the constituency relation of phrase structure grammar (=
constituency grammars) or the dependency relation of dependency grammars as
the underlying principle that organizes constituents into hierarchical structures.
When we say Phrase structure grammar it is a type of generative grammar in
which constituent structures are represented by phrase structure rules or rewrite
rules.
And Dependency grammar is a descriptive and theoretical tradition in linguistics
that can be traced back to antiquity. It has long been influential in the European
linguistics tradition and has more recently become a mainstream approach to
representing syntactic and semantic structure in natural language processing.
IC is based on the notion that a sentence is just not a linear string of word but a
sequence of components or group or words.
These group of words are called “constituents”
When they are joined by horizontal line, they are said to be in ‘construction’ with
each other.
The construction established relationship between the constituents.
When these constituents are considered as part of successive (next) unraveling
(showing) of a sentence, they are called immediate constituents (next element of a
sentence).
Thus, a sentence is cut into two parts and again into two parts. This is continued until
the smallest unit or morpheme is arrived.
In the sentence, “A young girl with an umbrella chased the boy”. First, we can divide
the sentence into two, “A young girl with an umbrella” as the first section, and
“chased the boy” will be the another section of the sentence. These two section can
be divided again like, ”a young girl” and “with an umbrella”. Same goes to the other
section, we have, “chased” and “the boy”. Now, we can also divide “a young girl” into
“a” and “young girl” and “with an umbrella” to “with” and “an umbrella”. However, on
the other section “chased” we cannot divide a word “chased” further, we can divide
in the sense of the word. “Chased” there is the past form of the verb because of the
suffix -d attach to it. So we can divide it by mentioning the present form of the verb
which is “chase” and instead of writing suffix -d, we can mention here the tense of
the verb that is in the past form of the verb. And “the boy” we can divide by making
“the” and “boy”. A “young girl” and “an umbrella” can be divided into another section
like this, “young” and “girl” also “an” and “umbrella”. On this way, the sentence was
divide into immediate constituents. The words “A”, “young”, “girl”, “with”, “an”,
“umbrella”, “chase”, “the” and “boy” is the constituents of the sentence “A young girl
with an umbrella chased the boy”. We cannot divide further the remaining words or it
is impossible to divide the remaining words because we already got the smallest
constituents of the sentence. This sentence was analyzed using the basic purpose of
this method and by using the tree diagram. But actually, the other way of showing
the constituents are with vertical lines and brackets. Like this,
One of the limitations of the IC-analysis is that, it does not indicate the nature and
grammatical functions of the constituents.
To remove the inadequacy, the idea of labeling was introduced by Mak Halliday.
These labels are two types – Class labels and Function labels.
Class labels are NP-noun phrase, VP-verb phrase, A-article, Adj.-Adjectives, etc.
Functions labels are S-Subject, V-verb , O-object, etc.
Example, in the sentence “Poor John ran away”. By using IC analysis, again, we
divide the sentence into two section, which are “Poor John” and “ran away”. “Poor
John” and “ran away” there is the immediate constituents of the whole sentence. By
using labeling, the first section “Poor John” can be labelled as a noun phrase. An
“ran away” there can be labelled as the verb phrase”. The labels “NP” or Noun
Phrase and “VP or Verb Phrase” usually called the nodes. Next to get the IC of the
two sections, we again divide each section. “Poor John” can be divided into “poor”
which labeled as adjective and “John” labeled as noun. The other section can be
divided into “ran” which is labeled verb, sorry for the typographical error, and away
labeled as adverb. Understand classmates?
So for the limitations of IC-analysis we have,
•
First, it cannot analyze structure which do not form proper grammatical
groups. For example, ‘She is taller than her sister’, here, ‘-er’ and ‘than’
cannot be explained properly.
•
Ambiguous sentences cannot be analyzed adequately. For example, ‘Time
flies’.
•
An overlapping also causes a problem for IC-analysis. For example, ’He has
no interest in music’.
•
Finally, an element remains unstated in sentences like ‘Hit the ball’.
For the conclusion, IC-analysis remains an established method of describing the
sentence elements.
In summary my dear classmates, Immediate constituent analysis is a form of
linguistic review that breaks down longer phrases or sentences into their constituent
parts, usually into single words. This kind of analysis is sometimes abbreviated as IC
analysis, and gets used extensively by a wide range of language experts. This kind
of exploration of language has applications for both societal or traditional linguistics,
and natural language processing in technology fields.
For those who use this kind of analysis to examine text or speech, immediate
constituent analysis often requires separating parts of a sentence or phrase into
groups of words with semantical synergy or related meaning. For example, the
sentence, “the car is fast,” could be broken down into two groups of words: “the car”
and “is fast.” In this case, the first group contains an article applied to a noun, and
the second group contains a verb followed by a defining adjective.
Many kinds of immediate constituent analysis include multi-step processing. For the
example, the two groups of words “the car” and “is fast” could be split up further into
individual words such as, “the”, “car”, “is” and “fast”. Reviewers might consider how
the article “the” applies to the word “car,” for instance, in specifying one particular
car. And how the adjective “fast” describes the verb “is,” in this case, in a simple,
rather than a comparative or superlative sense.