2. American Structuralists
2.1. Imediate 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.