Immediate constituent analysis

In linguistics, immediate constituent analysis or IC analysis is a method of sentence analysis that was proposed by Wilhelm Wundt and named by Leonard Bloomfield. The process reached a full-blown strategy for analyzing sentence structure in the distributionalist works of Zellig Harris and Charles F. Hockett,^[1] and in glossematics by Knud Togeby.^[2] 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.