In linguistics,
immediate constituent analysis or
IC analysis is a method of sentence analysis that was first mentioned by
Leonard Bloomfield and developed further by Rulon Wells. The process reached a full blown strategy for analyzing sentence structure in the early works of
Noam Chomsky. 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.