1.2 IC analysis
IC is the abbreviation of immediate constituent (IC). In general, IC is a technique for analyzing the constituents or the units that make up a language unit, that is, word cluster, phrase unit, clause unit, or sentence unit. More specifically, the analysis of a sentence into its immediate constituents is called IC analysis. In a nutshell, in IC analysis, a sentence is broken into its immediate constituents or morphemes.
The principle of IC analysis is to cut a sentence into two and to cut each of those parts into two and to continue with the segmentation until the smallest indivisible, meaningful, and syntactic units, the morphemes, are reached. Sometimes it is difficult to divide a sentence or part of a sentence into two. In such a case, segmentation into three or more elements is allowed.
To analyze the ICs of the sentence “The tall boy teases the girl”, we first divide it into two parts, “The tall boy” and “teases the girl”. Then we divide both of these two parts further into two parts, “The” and “tall boy”, “teases” and “the girl”. Following this principle, we will finally get the ICs of the sentence as “the”, “tall”, “boy”, “tease”, “-s”, “the” and “girl”. We can show this using one upright line for the first cut, two upright lines for the second and three upright lines for the last cut:
The | tall || boy | tease || s || the ||| girl.
The analysis of the immediate constituents of the sentence "The tall boy teases the girl" can also be shown by using a tree diagram:
Simply dividing a sentence into its immediate constituents or ICs does not provide much information on sentences and their construction. Firstly, it does not indicate what kind of elements the constituent parts are. It does not even identify any part of one sentence with any part of another. Secondly, IC analysis does not show clearly that noun phrases are built on nouns, verb phrases on verbs, prepositional phrases on prepositions, and so on. Finally, it does not tell us how to frame a sentence.
Notwithstanding, the purpose of analyzing immediate constituents is to avoid multiple interpretation of a phrase, clause, or sentence. Even though IC analysis has some weakness, this kind of analysis gives enough advantage in understanding language units, benefiting in avoiding ambiguity because of language units bound with its discourse context which can be understandable with those analysis.
References: