Immediate constituent analysis of words

1. Intermediate
Constituents (IC)
A-n-a-l-y-s-i-s
L. Bloomfield
Thennarasu Sakkan

2. Immediate Constituents
The distribution of any morpheme must be given in
terms of its environment, but some of its
environment may be important and the rest
relatively unimportant.
This is true of both morphology and syntax, and
perhaps it is more easily illustrated by the syntax.
For example, in the sentence 'BSNL throughout
India works very well.'

3. BSNL very well.worksthroughout India

4. We "feel" that very goes first with well and that
very well then goes with the verb works.
Similarly, throughout and India appear to "go
together," and these in turn "modify" BSNL.
We unite the subject BSNL throughout India with
all of the predicate work very well.
What we have done in this simple sentence is to
discover the relevant environment of each word or
group of words.

5. These sets of relevant environments correlate with
what we shall call immediate constituents, i.e. the
constituent elements immediately entering into any
meaningful combination.

6. In linguistics, immediate constituent analysis or IC
analysis is a method of word/sentence analysis that was
first mentioned by Leonard Bloomfield and developed
further by Rulon Wells.
The process reached a full blown strategy for analyzing
sentence structure in the early works of Noam Chomsky.
The practice is now widespread in morphology too.
Most tree structures employed to represent the syntactic
structure of sentences are products of some form of IC-
analysis.

7. The process and result of IC-analysis can, however, vary
greatly based upon whether one chooses the constituency
relation of phrase structure grammars (= constituency
grammars) or the dependency relation of dependency
grammars as the underlying principle that
organizes constituents into hierarchical structures.

8. It is based on the notion that a sentence is just not a linear
string of word but a sequence of components or groups
of words.
I C ANALYSIS.
These groups of words are called ‘constituents’.
When they are joined by horizontal line , they are said to be
in ‘construction’ with each other.
The construction establishes relationship between the
constituents.
When these constituents are considered as a part of successive
(next) unraveling (showing) of a sentence , they are called
as immediate constituents (next element of a sentence).

9. Concept
Method of breaking the given
sentence into groups in such way
that it remains the relation to the
nearest constituent(word or group
of words ).

10. Points to Remember
Components or group of
the words are
"constituents”
Joint horizontal line of the
constituents is called
construction
Construction establishes
the relationship among the
constituents
Two nearest constituents
are called immediate
constituents
First , sentence is cut into
two parts again two
parts………
Till the smallest unit or
morpheme

11. Ways of showing the IC
Box Diagram
Brackets
diagram
Tree Diagram
The boy
[[The] [boy ] ][[eat] [s] [the ] [mango ] [es]]
eat s the mango es

12. Ex. (1)
Ex. (2)
Ex. (3)
Ex. (4)
Ex.( 5)
[The boy ] [ jump + ed the wall ]
[All ] [ those [ old ] women ]
[She] [ [ is ] [ beautiful ] ]
[The cat] [ is ] [ [under] the table] ]
[I reached there on time] [but] [you were not
ready]

13. A word of one morpheme, like book, has, of course, just one
unitary part.
A word of two morphemes, like cheerful, is obviously
composed of two parts, with the division between them:
Cheer + ful
boy + ish + ness
Gentleman + ly + ness
Cheer and -ful were put together to give Cheerful.
You see that the word cheerful is a made up of two constituents.
Anti+ dis+ establish +ment +arian +ism

14. Immediate Constituents
1. Gentleman +ly
2. Gentleman +ly +ness
In doing word diagrams like those above to show layers of
structure, we make successive divisions into two parts, each of
which is called an Immediate Constituent, abbreviated as IC.
words have a special type of structure characterized as hierarchical.

15. The process is continued until all component morphemes of a
word, the ultimate constituents, have been isolated.

16. Here are three recommendations on IC division:
Recommendations on IC Division
1. If a word ends in an inflectional suffix, the first cut is
between the suffix and the rest of the word.
2. One of the ICs should be, if possible, a free form.
3. The meaning of the ICs should be related to meaning of
the word.

17. some words are ambiguous in that they have more than one
meaning.
When we examine their internal structure, we find out that
they may be analyzed in more than one way.

19. Instruction:
a. Write the forms phonemically.
b. Underline each morpheme.
c. Indicate under each morpheme the following distinctions: B for
"bound," F for "free," R for "root," and NR for "non-root."
1. Football 2. friends 3. foolish 4.fisherman
5. guardedly 6. leaderless 7. distasteful 8.bandageless
9. resourcefulness 10. glueyness 11. bombsights 12. blackberry
13. disappoint 14. angelic 15. peaches 16. fanatical
17. greenhouses 18. provide 19. involve 20. fish