In the sentence “The old man ran away,” the first division into immediate constituents would be between “the old man” and “ran away.” The immediate constituents of “the old man” are “the” and “old man.” At the next level “old man” is divided into “old” and “man.” The term was introduced by the United States linguist …

The dependency grammar tree shows five words and word combinations as constituents: who, these, us, these diagrams, and show us. The phrase structure tree, in contrast, shows nine words and word combinations as constituents: what, do, these, diagrams, show, us, these diagrams, show us, and do these diagrams show us.

In English grammar, a constituent is a linguistic part of a larger sentence, phrase, or clause. For instance, all the words and phrases that make up a sentence are said to be constituents of that sentence.

Six Steps in a Syntactic Analysis

1. Segmentation I: Identify clauseboundaries and word boundaries.
2. Classification I: Determine parts of speech.
3. Segmentation II: Identify constituents.
4. Classification II: Determine the syntactic categories for the constituents.
5. Determine the grammatical functions of the constituents.
6. Draw the syntactic structure.

Limitations of I C analysis: 1) First it cannot analyze structure which do not form proper grammatical groups. For example ‘She is taller than her sister’, here ‘er-than’ sequence cannot be explained properly. 2) Ambiguous sentences cannot be analyzed adequately.

Leonard Bloomfield

IC analysis is a technique of analyzing constituents of a sentence. It can be segmented from a phrase, clause or sentence. In IC analysis, a sentence is broken up into immediate constituents. Divided constituents are also divided into further immediate constituents.

IC-analysis cannot assign a natural P- marker to sentences containing discontinuous constituents. That is, sometimes IC analysis cannot divide a construction into two because elements that belong together are separated in the sequence (i.e. discontinuous).

IC analysis is a very important tool for syntactically analysis. The technique applies that a sentence must be analyzed into immediate constituents actor and action. The construction inside the immediate constituents must be further analyzed until the final constituents are reached that is a word.

Syntax, the arrangement of words in sentences, clauses, and phrases, and the study of the formation of sentences and the relationship of their component parts.

A modifier is a word, phrase, or clause that modifies—that is, gives information about—another word in the same sentence.