IMMEDIATE CONSITUENT

ANALYSIS (ICA)

Doctor Chimwemwe Kamanga

(2024)

(Department of Language, Cultural and Creative

Studies- Mzuzu University)
 Immediate constituent analysis
 Immediate constituent analysis (ICA) is a
descriptive approach in syntactic analysis that
aims at investigating the distribution of forms in
a language.
 The approach is designed to show how small
constituents or components in sentences go
together to form larger constituents.
 For example, the sentence Her father brought a
shotgun to the wedding has eight constituents.
 Constituents
 A constituent is one of two or more
grammatical units that enter syntactically or
morphologically into a construction at any
level.
 Examples of constituents are Immediate
constituent, Ultimate constituent,
Construction, Discontinuous constituents,
Morpheme, and Zero constituents.
 Immediate constituents
 An immediate constituent is any one of the
larger grammatical units that constitute a
construction.
 Immediate constituents are often further
reducible.
 Example: In the NP the dog that killed the rat,
the, dog, and that killed the rat are immediate
constituents.
 Ultimate constituents
 An ultimate constituent is one of the
grammatically irreducible units that constitute
a construction.
 Example: In the NP the dog that killed the rat,
the, dog, that, kill, -ed, the, and rat are
ultimate constituents.
 Constructions
 A construction is an ordered arrangement of
grammatical units forming a larger unit.
 Examples include Apposition, Clause chain,
Direct speech, Elliptical construction,
Endocentric construction, Idiom, Indirect
speech, Phrase, Sentence, Serial verb
construction, Stem, and Word
 Discontinuous constructions
 Discontinuous constructions are constituents
that are:
 Separated from each other by one or more
intervening constituents; and
 Considered either syntactically contiguous and
unitary or realising the same, single meaning.
 Examples: Certain phrasal verbs such as
switch the light on; word segments separated
by expletive insertions such as abso-bloomin-
lutely; and inflectional agreement markers.
 Morphemes
 A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in
the grammar of a language.
 Current approaches to Morphology conceive
of morphemes as rules involving the linguistic
context, rather than as isolated pieces of
linguistic matter.
 They acknowledge that:
 Meaning may be directly linked to suprasegmental
phonological units such as tone or stress; and
 Morphemes (Continued)
 The meaning of a morpheme with a given form may
vary, depending on its immediate environment.
 For example, the word Unladylike:
 Consists of three morphemes and four syllables;
 Has three morpheme breaks; un- (not), lady (well
behaved female adult human), and –like (having the
characteristic of); and
 None of these morphemes can be broken up any
more without losing all sense of meaning.
 Zero constituent
 A zero constituent is a constituent proposed in
an analysis to represent an element held to be
present at an abstract level but not realised in
the data.
 A zero constituent is a unit proposed as a
contrast to an element that might otherwise be
present.
 Examples of zero constituent
 A zero morpheme (ø) proposed for the plural
for sheep.
 A zero conjunction proposed for he said ø he
was coming, in contrast with he said that he
was coming.
 A zero realisation of a semantic argument
proposed for the second clause in I eat
breakfast before 7 A.M.; John eats ø about 8
A.M.
 Stems
 A stem is the root or roots of a word together
with any derivational affixes, to which
inflectional affixes are added.
 A stem consists minimally of a root, but may
be analysed into a root plus derivational
morphemes.
 A stem may require an inflectional operation
(often involving a prefix or suffix) in order to
ground it into discourse and make it a fully
understandable word.
 Stems (Continued)
 If a stem does not occur by itself in a
meaningful way in a language, it is referred to
as a bound morpheme.
 Examples of morphemes are tie and untie,
which can be inflected into ties and unties
using the inflectional suffix –s.
 Words
 A word is a unit that is a constituent at the
phrase level and above.
 It is sometimes identifiable according to such
criteria as:
 Being the minimal possible unit in a reply;
 Having features such as a regular stress pattern and
phonological changes conditioned by or blocked at
word boundaries;
 Words (Continued)
 Being the largest unit resistant to insertion of new
constituents within its boundaries; or
 Being the smallest constituent that can be moved
within a sentence without making the sentence
ungrammatical.
 A word is sometimes placed, in a hierarchy of
grammatical constituents, above the
morpheme level and below the phrase level.
 Words (Continued)
 Words are single distinct meaningful elements
of speech or writing used with others or alone
to form other syntactic structures.
 Examples of words include Adjective,
Adposition, Adverb, Classifier, Clitic,
Conjunction, Determiner, Dummy word,
Emphasis marker, Exclamative, Existential
marker, Fossilised term, Honorific, Ideophone,
Interjection, Particle, Pro-form, Substantive,
and Verb.
 Phrases
 A phrase is a syntactic structure that consists
of one word or more than one word but occurs
within a clause or a sentence and does not
make complete sense on its own.
 Examples of phrases are Adpositional Phrase,
Noun Phrase and Verb Phrase.
 Clauses
 A clause is a unit of grammatical organisation
next below the sentence in rank, consisting of
a subject and a predicate.
 A clause is a grammatical unit that includes, at
a minimum, a predicate and an explicit or
implied subject, which expresses a
proposition.
 Examples
Adverbial clause, Coordinate clause, Equative
clause, Existential clause, Final clause, Finite
clause, Main clause, Marking clause, Medial
clause, Nominal clause, Nonfinite clause,
Reference clause, Relative clause and
Subordinate clause.
 Sentences
 A sentence is a grammatical unit that is
composed of one or more clauses.
 The term sentence may be expanded to include
elliptical material and nonproductive items
such as After lunch, Yes and Hello.
 Examples of sentences are Complex sentence,
Compound sentence, Matrix sentence and
Simple sentence.
 Predicates
 A predicate is a part of a sentence or a clause
containing a verb and stating something about
the subject of the sentence or the clause.
 A predicate is something which is affirmed or
denied concerning an argument of a
proposition.
 Example: went home in John went home.