Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA)
| Site: | Plateforme pédagogique de l'Université Sétif2 |
| Course: | Introduction to Linguistics |
| Book: | Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) |
| Printed by: | Visiteur anonyme |
| Date: | Wednesday, 12 March 2025, 6:13 PM |
1. Immediate Constituent Analysis
In addition to his remarkable contribution to the fields of phonology and morphology, Bloomfield’s name is usually attached to a pioneering syntactic theory called immediate constituent analysis (ICA). Basically, ICA is an explicit method of analysing sentences grammatically by dividing them into their component parts. It is structural in nature because it no longer considers a sentence as a sequence or string of isolated elements, but it is made up of layers of groups or constituents. A constituent is a group of words or morphemes with closer relationships between one another than between the elements of the other groups or constituents within the same sentence. The constituent is part of a larger unit.
The methodology of ICA consists in splitting a sentence up into two immediate constituents, which are analysable into further constituents. This process of segmentation continues until the smallest indivisible units, the morphemes, are reached. The latter are called the ultimate constituents, and each is given an identifying label. As a principle, the partition in ICA is binary. Let us take Bloomfield’s classical example “Poor John ran away”. To show divisions in this sentence, it is possible to use two ways:
1. Bracketing
[[[poor] [John] ] [ [ran] [away]]]
2. Tree diagram
According to ICA, a sentence is not seen a string of elements but it is made up of layers of constituents (or nodes). Thus, constituent structure is hierarchical.
1.1. 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.