What is IC analysis? Exemplify IC analysis through a tree diagram and determine its limitations.

Answer

What is IC analysis? Exemplify IC analysis through a tree diagram and determine its limitations.

IC Analysis stands for Immediate Constituent Analysis. Leonard Bloomfield first introduced IC analysis in 1933. Later, Zellig Harris and Charles F. Hockett improved the method. They made the process more transparent and more useful. IC analysis uses tree diagrams to show sentence structure. To understand this better, we must understand the key point.

Understanding IC Analysis: IC Analysis is used in linguistics. It helps to break a sentence into parts. The sentence is split into big groups. Then those groups are broken again. The biggest part is the full sentence. On the other hand, the smallest parts are words or morphemes. It shows how words form a structure. Let us take the sentence, “The little girl saw a dog.” 

Tree Diagram: The tree diagram of “The little girl saw a dog.” looks like this:

Explanation: This sentence can be divided into two main parts. The first part is the noun phrase (NP): “The little girl.” The second part is the verb phrase (VP): “saw a dog.” In the tree diagram, “S” means the whole sentence. “S” is split into NP and VP.

The noun phrase (NP) “The little girl” is broken down further. “The” is a determiner (Det). “Little” is an adjective (Adj). “Girl” is a noun (N). So, NP has three parts: Det (“The”), Adj (“little”), N (“girl”).

The verb phrase (VP) is also divided. “Saw” is the verb (V). “A dog” is a noun phrase (NP) within the verb phrase. The NP “a dog” splits into “a” and “dog.” Here, “a” is a determiner (Det) and “dog” is a noun (N).

Each box in the diagram stands for a part. Lines connect larger parts to smaller parts. Each phrase is divided