Syntax
In Linguistics, syntax is "the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages"[1]. It assumes that:
- natural language sentences can be broken down into components (the so-called syntactic constituents);
- the resulting structure (i.e., the relations between syntactic constituents) is hierarchical (a tree-like structure) rather than a simple list; and
- the structure can be predicted by rules (i.e., the structure is regular), which consist the grammar of the language.
For instance, the sentence:
they killed the man
is more productively represented as (1) than (2)
|
[they][ ][killed][ ][the][ ][man] | |
| (1) | (2) |
Immediate Constituent Analysis
In linguistics, immediate constituent analysis or IC analysis is a method of sentence analysis that was first mentioned by Leonard Bloomfield[2] and developed further by Rulon Wells[3]. The process reached a full blown strategy for analyzing sentence structure in the early works of Noam Chomsky[1]. The practice is now widespread. Most tree structures employed to represent the syntactic structure of sentences are products of some form of IC-analysis. The process and result of IC-analysis can, however, vary greatly based upon whether one chooses the constituency relation of phrase structure grammars (= constituency grammars) or the dependency relation of dependency grammars as the underlying principle that organizes constituents into hierarchical structures.
