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Immediate Constituent analysis
What is referred to in this volume as (Post-) Bloomfieldian American structural
grammar (see (POST-) BLOOMFIELDIAN AMERICAN STRUCTURAL
GRAMMAR) is based on a ‘bottom-up’ approach to grammatical analysis—beginning
with the smallest linguistic unit and showing how smaller units combine to form larger
ones. Immediate Constituent analysis (henceforth IC analysis), however, begins with a
sentence, say Poor John ran away (Bloomfield, 1935, p. 161), the immediate constituents
of which are poor John and ran away, and works gradually down through its constituent
parts until the smallest units that the grammar deals with, which will be the ultimate
constituents of a sentence, are reached; it is a ‘top-down’ approach. Both approaches are
solely concerned with the surface structures of language: that is, they deal only with the
language that is physically manifest, whether written or spoken, and make no mention of
underlying structures or categories of any kind. The constituents may be represented
hierarchically in rectangular boxes (Allen and Widdowson, 1975, p. 55):
or in a Chinese box arrangement (W.N.Francis, 1958; Allen and Widdowson, 1975, p.
56):
or lines between the constituents may be used (see Palmer, 1971, p. 124):
A ||| young |||| man || with ||| a |||| paper | follow-||| ed || the |||| girl ||| with ||||
a ||||| blue |||||| dress.