15immediate constituent analysis商务英语商务英语.pdf

Immediate Constituent Analysi Constituent Constituent is a term used in structural sentence analysis for every linguistic unit, which is a part of a larger linguistic unit. Several constituents can be joined together to form a construction. Constituent Structure A sentence or phrase is not only composed of sequences of words in a linear order, but also of hierarchies of constituents. Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA In structural linguistics, a very important methodological tool for syntactic analysis is a method called immediate constituent analysis (IC analysis). This method was first developed by Leonard Bloomfield. He illustrated the way in which it was possible to take a sentence, such as Poor John ran away, and split it up into two immediate constituents poor John / ran away These are in turn analyzable into further constituents poor // John / ran // away Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA In other words, a sentence is seen not as a sequence or a ‘string’ of elements Poor + John + ran + away but as being made up of layers of constituents. This may be made quite clear in the form of a tree diagram such as S (sentence NP VP Adj. N. V. Adv. Poor John ran away It may also be shown with brackets as It may also be shown with brackets as { [(Poor) (John)] [(ran) (away)] } { [(Poor) (John)] [(ran) (away)] } This type of analysis is similar to the traditional parsing in that the first cut comes at the boundary between subject and predicate. But it also differs from the latter in an important way. Traditionally, the grammarian analyzing the sentence would say poor is an attributive, John the subject,