Bloomfieldian concept of constituent structure is primarily a syntactic concept.
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 688.
Immediate constituent analysis or IC Analysis is a method of sentence analysis. It is a major feature of Bloomfieldian structuralist linguistics. IC analysis was unknown before the twentieth century; traditional grammarians had only a limited conception of phrases and never developed a clear notion of constituency. It is usually considered that IC analysis was introduced by L. Bloomfield, and that L. Bloomfield was the first linguist ever to take an analytical view of sentence structure, in contrast to the earlier synthetic view, in which a sentence was regarded as an assembly of words.
The aim of traditional syntactic description is to show how the different parts of speech and their different inflectional forms are employed to form sentences. The sentence, it may be noted, is regarded here as a combination of words, i.e., it is defined synthetically. In fact, the four basic units of traditional grammar: letter, syllable, word, and sentence, form a straightforward ascending hierarchy, and the Greek word syntaxis itself suggests the idea of arranging things in an ordered array.
Sentences are thought of in traditional grammar as combinations of words, not combinations of phrases. In traditional grammar the head and its attribute are not said to constitute a phrase. There is in fact no such thing in traditional grammar as a noun phrase in the sense in which this term is used today by professional linguists. Traditional grammarians do not divide sentences into phrases without residue; traditional grammar knows nothing of phrase structure.
In IC analysis, a sentence is divided up into major divisions or “immediate constituents”.
Immediate constituent - a constituent of a sentence at the first step in an analysis e.g., the immediate constituents of a sentence are the subject and the predicate.
Immediate constituents: NP and VP are immediate constituents of S, Det and N of NP, and so on. Det, N, and V are irreducible constituents of S.
The branching nodes are called constitutes and the relation between the branching nodes and their constituents is called constituency.
These constituents are in turn divided into further immediate constituents, and this process continues until irreducible constituents are reached, i.e., until each constituent consists of only a word or meaningful part of a word. The results of an immediate constituent analysis can be presented in various ways, using a tree diagram, phrase structure rules,or a box diagram. They reveal the hierarchical immediate constituent structure of a sentence. Every branch of the tree represents a single constituent of the sentence, and every constituent, or node, is labelled with a node label explaining to which syntactic category it belongs. There are standard abbreviations: S=Sentence, NP=Noun Phrase, VP=Verb Phrase, N' =N-bar, V=Verb, AP=Adjective Phrase; A=Adjective, N=Noun.
Immediate constituent analysis is the most basic syntactic organizational principle of transformational grammar.
For sentences whose structures are unusual, this diagramming may become excessively complex; in such cases verbal description is used.
For example, the sentence “The girl is happy” can be divided into immediate constituents “The girl” and “is happy”. These in turn can be analyzed into immediate constituents (the+girl) and (is+happy), and so on. L. Bloomfield doesn't give any special technique to detect immediate constituents, rather appeals to the native speaker's intuition.
Three fundamental characteristics of this kind of syntactic analysis can be represented. These are the notions:
1. That any sentence breaks down or can be split binarily into a subject part and a predicate part. Thus, the English sentence Poor John ran away breaks down into poor John, the subject part, and ran away, the predicate part.
2. That some groups of words are syntactically equivalent to single words. Thus, the group of words very rich is equivalent syntactically to the single word poor in the expressions very rich man and poor man.|
3. That the analysis of a sentence yields a single unbroken hierarchy of groups. For example, the sentence Poor John ran away is analysed first into poor John and ran away. The first of these two constituent parts of the sentence is in turn analysed into poor and John, and the second into ran and away. In no instance are discontinuous constituents recognized, say poor ... away, nor do any constituents overlap, as they would if we posited poor John and John ran as constituents. Note also that two constituents are recognized each time the process of analysis is applied to a sequence. To divide a sentence such as English John loves Mary into three immediate constituents (John, loves, and Mary would not be considered a normal analysis by the practitioners of this theory.
The exhaustive analysis of a sentence into a series of immediate constituents, all the way down to the individual words or morphemes which are its ultimate constituents, particularly when such analysis is regarded as displaying the fundamental syntactic structure of the sentence. The term is commonly applied to a representation of constituent structure in which nodes are not labelled for their syntactic category, though in some versions heads are recognized and constituents are classified as endocentric,exocentric or coordinate.
Itis obvious that that dividing a sentence into ICs does not provide much semantic information. Nevertheless, it can sometimes prove useful if we want to account for the ambiguity of certain constructions. A classic example is the phrase old men and women which can be interpreted in two different ways. Ambiguity of this kind is referred to as syntactic ambiguity. By providing IC analysis we can make the two meanings clear:
Old men / and women old / men and women
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