The Constituent Structure

The PS grammar is an alternative way of expressing the information in a tree diagram employing rewrite rules. This is a method of structural description. It specifies the subunits and the level at whi...

Phrase Structure Grammar

The second of Chomsky's 'three models for language description' is Phrase Structure Grammar. A phrase structure grammar can generate any set of sentences that a finite state grammar can generate. But ...

Generative Grammar

Generative grammar, a very formal system, is the first of the three models for describing the language discussed by linguist Noam Chomsky in Syntactic Structures. In linguistics, generative grammar is...

IC Analysis: Advantages and Limitations

Immediate Constituent Analysis, also known as IC Analysis, is a method used in linguistics to analyse the hierarchical structure of sentences by breaking them down into their immediate constituents or...

IC Analysis of Sentences

A single sentence comprises an NP (subject) and a predicate phrase. Apart from a compulsory verbal group, this predicate phrase may optionally have one or more noun phrase(s), preposition phrase(s), a...

The Gleason Method 

The Gleason Method in linguistics, developed by influential American linguist Henry Allan Gleason, is a systematic approach to analysing and understanding languages. This method includes a variety of ...

Labelled IC Analysis

Immediate Constituent analysis analyses each utterance into the smallest meaningful units possible. In this model, we begin by cutting the sentence into two natural divisions, and each is again cut in...

Immediate Constituent Analysis

The advent of generative grammar with the publication of Chomsky's monograph Syntactic Structures in 1957 was a scientific revolution. This revolution was directed almost exclusively against the taxon...

The Structuralist View of Grammar

The beginning of the 20th century was marked by a new approach to grammar suggested by linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure and American linguists such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloo...

The ‘Bloomfieldians’

Linguistics in the United States has been strongly influenced by the necessity of describing as many of the hundreds of previously unrecorded languages existing in North America as possible. Since t...