ABSTRACT
What is referred to in this volume as (Post-) Bloomfieldian American structural grammar (see (POST-) BLOOMFIELDIAN AMERICAN STRUCTURAL GRAMMAR) is based on a ‘bottom-up’ approach to grammatical analysis-beginning with the smallest linguistic unit and showing how smaller units combine to form larger ones. Immediate Constituent analysis (henceforth IC analysis), however, begins with a sentence, say Poor John ran away (Bloomfield, 1935, p. 161), the immediate constituents of which are poor John and ran away, and works gradually down through its constituent parts until the smallest units that the grammar deals with, which will be the ultimate constituents of a sentence, are reached; it is a ‘top-down’ approach. Both approaches are solely concerned with the surface structures of language: that is, they deal only with the language that is physically manifest, whether written or spoken, and make no mention of underlying structures or categories of any kind. The constituents may be represented hierarchically in rectangular boxes (Allen and Widdowson, 1975, p. 55):
or in a Chinese box arrangement (W.N.Francis, 1958; Allen and Widdowson, 1975, p. 56):
or lines between the constituents may be used (see Palmer, 1971, p. 124):
A ||| young |||| man || with ||| a |||| paper | follow-||| ed || the |||| girl ||| with |||| a ||||| blue |||||| dress.
