The IC Method (method of immediate constituents)

This method was elaborated by the head of American Descriptive Linguistics Leonard Bloomfield.The IC method aims at describing any complex form ranging from long sentences to multi-element words in terms of their constituents. The form is divided into two parts, the remaining parts are also divided into parts until ultimate indivisible pieces are arrived at:

un][gent]le][man][ly.The main requirement on the morphological level is that ultimate constituents (or at least one of them) should be recognizable as morphemes: book||let; let is a diminutive suffix. The word ham||let (a small village) can also be divided into 2 parts , though we do not know what ham here means.

Proceeding from the intuition of a native speaker, L.Bloomfield analyzed the sentence Poor John ran away in the following way Poor ][ John// ran ][ away.

The main requirement of the method on the syntactical level is that ultimate constituents should be words.

There are several varieties of diagramming of this analysis. We can represent the candelabra division (1) and the derivation tree division (2).

Poor John ran away (1) (candelabra diagram)

└---------┘ └------┘

└--------┘

/ \

NP VP (2) This is a derivation tree division.

/ \ / \

A N V D

Poor John runs away

/ \

NP VP

/ \ / \

T N V D

The rain falls greyly

The word greyly semantically refers to the noun rain, but the diagram doesn’t show it..

The method shows the derivation of a sentence, but it’s formalized, mechanistic, it disregards meanings and can’t be employed to analyze polysemy, homonymy, ambiguity, implicit syntactic relations, syncretism.

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<== попередня сторінка	\|	наступна сторінка ==>
The Distributional method	\|	The Transformational Method

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