American Structuralism

2.2. Weaknesses of ICA

In spite of its popularity and scientific rigour, ICA was shown to involve inherent limitations because as a model of language description, its descriptive framework did not cover all the aspects of language that constitute the knowledge of a native speaker, and it contained some analytical inconsistencies. The main weaknesses for which this analysis is reprimanded are the following:

a) In some sentences, it is not always clear where the division should be.

b) ICA does not  indicate the role or function of constituents as they are not labelled. When parsing is done, some implied grammatical information is included (circularity of argument)

c) In ICA division is arbitrarily binary, while some sentences may have alternative analyses.

d) The analysis in ICA does not go beyond the morpheme.

e) Because it focuses only on the surface of the sentence (formal properties), ICA cannot show the syntactic relationship between sentences which are superficially different (active/passive, positive/negative) and fails to show the differences between sentences which are superficially similar.

f) ICA cannot handle lexical and syntactic ambiguity in the sentence.

g) ICA does not demonstrate how to form new sentences.

h) ICA cannot handle sentences with discontinuous elements.

i) ICA cannot handle complex sentences.