Question

What is IC analysis?

• A. A method of analyzing sentences
• B. A tool to analyse the structure of sentences
• C. Breaking up of sentences into constituents
• D. All of the above

Answer 1

Answer:

D. All of the above

IC analysis stands for Immediate Constituent analysis, and it is:

A method in linguistics used to analyze the internal structure of a sentence by breaking it down into its immediate constituents — that is, its major components or parts.

IC Analysis Involves:

1. ✅ Analyzing sentences — it’s a method used in syntactic analysis.

2. ✅ A tool to understand sentence structure — helps identify hierarchical relations among sentence parts.

3. ✅ Breaking up sentences into constituents — like breaking a sentence into NP (noun phrase) and VP (verb phrase), and further into smaller units.

Example:

Sentence: The boy kicked the ball.

• First-level ICs: [The boy] [kicked the ball]

• Further ICs:

  • [The] [boy]

  • [kicked] [the ball]

  • [the] [ball]