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, and in glossematics by Knud Togeby. 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.