STRUCTURALIST VIEW OF GRAMMAR AND IC ANALYSIS

INTRODUCTION

The most influential school of linguistics, that of 'structural' was associated with the name of Leonard Bloomfield, the American linguist. The main thesis of this school is that language has a structure. Bloomfieldian or post-Bloomfieldian linguistics envisaged language structure in a precise way. In particular, it was associated with the phoneme as the unit of phonology and morpheme as the unit of grammar. Phonemes are the sounds or strictly the distinctive sounds of language. Both phonemes and morphemes are the units of form, not of meaning. The essential structural approach to language is supposed to be composed of morphemes in sequence, i.e, strings of morphemes, and at a different level, of strings of phonemes. It was recognized that there were other units larger than morphemes, like tagmeme, taxeme, sememe and episememe. The concentration on terminological precision was very beneficial in fostering a more rigorous attitude towards grammatical analysis. These concepts turned out to be the cornerstones on which the whole theories of language structure came to be constructed. One example of this is the sememic approach to language developed by S.M. Lamb of the Copenhagen School. Another is the theory of K.L.Pike who attempts to apply emic ideas to phonology, grammar and vocabulary, but also insists on applying the same to the analysis of other areas of human behaviour.

A 'structural' view of linguistics took shape, analogous to other sciences where abstractions were made of constant elements and relationships between them was stated. Structural Linguistics relied on formal criteria for these abstractions. In its more excessive manifestations it tried to exclude the study of meaning. It preferred to look at form and substance and ignore meaning because it was thought to be impossible to describe it. Structuralism might be summarized by saying that it sought to explain the working of language in terms of the functions of its components and their relationship to each other. First it was necessary to isolate the various kinds of components, then to analyse their composition in such a way as to enable a generalization to be made concerning their internal structure and then to relate these components and subcomponents in terms of their function in the total structure of which they formed part. The immediate constituent analysis was based on this grammar.

Basic Assumptions of Structuralists

The structuralist grammar may describe two different states of the language, e.g. may describe a) 'the man bought a dog' and b) 'the dog was bought by a man'. As for the assumptions it may be said as follows: 1) priority of the spoken language, 2) objective treatment of all languages, 3) importance of synchronic description, 4) system vs. structure, 5) Language and utterance (langue and parole). According to Harris, the aim of this school is to begin with the raw data and arrive at a grammatical description of the corpus and therefore of the language. There are two major steps at this stage, each applied at every level of analysis (phonology, morphology and syntax). The first of these is the setting up of the elements involved (i.e. phonemic, morphemic and syntactic). The second is to state the distribution of these elements relative to each other. First the phonological elements are set up, followed by a statement of their distribution. Then the morphological elements are set up, then the relations among them. Lastly the syntax is analysed into constituents and their relationship stated in terms of their structures. The resulting statement contains relatively few elements and classes of elements. Thus the structural linguistics is committed to the study of a language in its own terms in order to arrive at an abstract, synchronic description of the organization of the language analysed.

Bloomfield's sentence 'Poor John ran away' might be described as a simple sentence, made up of the noun 'John' modified by the adjective 'poor' and whose predicate is a verb phrase, consisting of the verb 'ran' and modified by the adverb away.' Underlying both the approaches to grammatical analysis is the view that sentences are not just linear sequences of elements, but are made up of layers of immediate constituents, each lower level constituent being part of a higher level constituent. One can distinguish three periods of development in the theory of constituent structure. Bloomfield himself did little more than introduce the notion and explain it by examples. He spoke of a proper analysis of the sentence into its constituents as one, which takes account of the meanings. His followers, Wells and Harris, formulated the principle of constituent analysis in greater detail and replaced Bloomfield's method with explicitly distributional criteria. Finally in the last few years the theory of constituent structure has been formalized and subjected to mathematical study by Chomsky and other scholars who have given considerable attention to the nature of the rules required to generate sentences.

Constructions may be classified according to their distribution and that of their constituents into what are commonly, called 'endocentric' and 'exocentric' constructions. An endocentric construction is one whose distribution is identical with that of one or more of its constituents. All the others are exocentric. In other words, exocentricity is defined negatively with reference to a prior definition of endocentricity. For example, 'poor John' is endocentric, since it has the same distribution as its constituent 'John.' Any English sentence in which John occurs can be matched with another sentence in which, poor John occurs in the same position. On the other hand 'in Vancouver' has much the same distribution in English sentences as 'there' and other adverbs of place. All nouns have the same distribution at the high level of classification for which the term 'noun' is used. At a* lower level two nouns might have a different distribution, one being animate and the other being inanimate, etc. The concepts of end centricity and exocentricity are therefore to be used with respect to some specified sub classification. Endocentric constructions fall into two main types: coordinating and subordinating. Coordinating constructions have the same distribution as each of their constituents, taken separately. Thus 'bread and cheese' and 'coffee or tea' are coordinating noun phrases. However, the two phrases belong to different subtypes, the first taking a plural verb and the second a singular verb. Subordinatingconstructions have the same distribution as one of their constituents.

E.g. A + N

(Poor John); Adv. + V(awfully clever); N (or NP) + Adv. (or adverbial phrase)(the girl upstairs), the man on the bus). The constituent whose distribution is the same as that of the resultant construction is called the head; the other constituent is the modifier. In subordinate constructions one modifier may be recursively nested within another. For example, in 'the man on the top of the bus' there are two constituents- the man (head) and On the top of the bus (modifier). 'On the top of the bus' is an exocentric adverbial phrase consisting of the preposition 'on' and the noun phrase 'the top of the bus.' 'The top of the bus1 is endocentric, its constituents being 'top' (head) and 'of the bus' (modifier).

IC Analysis

The aim of the immediate constituent analysis is to find out the parts of an utterance and how they are put together. It is assun ed that an utterance is decomposable into small units. Moreover, the analysis should reveal the structure of the utterance - that -3, the arrangement of the units. The structuralist assumes that utterances are physically separable and that linguistic structure can be described as a combination of the units and subunits of the spoken form.

Bloomfield's sentence 'Poor John ran away' can be explained in terms of IC analysis.

Poor John can away
Poor John - run away

Poor Poor run away

The native speaker recognizes that this sentence can be immediately cut into two: Poor John and ran away. Poor John and ran away are immediate constituents of the sentence. They are immediate because there are no mediating or interrupting entities between them. Similarly poor and John are the ICs of Poor John; ran and away are the ICs of ran away. Poor, John, ran and away are the ultimate constituents of the construction Poor John ran away. The native speaker perceives a hierarchy of relationships and layers of structure. There are groups and groups within groups, which seem to form natural classes. The linguist has to find out what the constituents are - both immediate and ultimate. It should be possible to^ind out the syntax of the language under examination. This seemed a powerful and more insightful way to represent the syntactic structure of languages.

Utilizing the insights of Bloomfield, many other linguists came forward to develop it and make it more meaningful. Eugene Nida in his A Synopsis nf English Syntax made a detailed examination of English and set up classes far mole than any previous analysis. Rulon Wells made a deeper study and presented a systematic account of the IC analysis. Much more rigorous are the procedures and the presentation of Zellig Harris. Charles Fries contributed significantly to the development of syntactic studies with his A Structure of American English.

Eugene Nida and Construction Types

All constructions are divided into two broad classes - hypotactic and paratactic. The hypotactic are further divided into exocentric and endocentric classes. The endocentric are further divided into coordinate and subordinate constructions.

The following symbols are used to indicate the relationship between the constituents:

Hypotactic

Nida has shown that syntactic structure can be represented visually and more systematically than in the traditional sentence diagrams. Nida's diagrams show what the constituents are and how close or distant they are to the other constituents in the construction. He made a classification of construction types different from the traditional grammatical categories, the parts of speech.

Multiple ICs

Bloomfield's sentence Poor John ran away happens to be a fairly simple four-word sentence and this kind of division into two - binary or dichotomous cutting looks natural enough so that one could do it without pausing to reflect.Consider: the foot-pound -second system which can be cut as either:

In the following diagram the constituents seem to have an equal status. So, a more satisfying division proposed by Wells is

treating them as multiple constituents.

Markers

There are two possible cuts for men and women as in the following:

Hockett sets up 'and' as a marker, a constituent whose status is different from that of the other constituents.

Discontinuous ICs

Wells considers the construction call your friend up as having two constituents: your friend and call up. Here the particle up is not immediate but far away from call. Even so the interruption is disregarded because the surface distance and syntactic distance do not alwa s have to coincide.

Ambiguous ICs

The construction old men and women is ambiguous because it can be interpreted either as 'old men and old women' or 'women and old men'. The analysis of this construction should be accordingly either

in difference in the syntactic organization is reflected by the difference in the two analyses of the construction into its ICs. The more complicated types also can arise. The construction lady-killer has two senses: 1) a lady who is a killer and 2) a killer of ladies. The IC analysis is the same for both the senses.

Harris, another famed linguist, describes the large structure in terms of the sequences of units of which it is composed. While the others proceeded from the larger structure and arrived at the solitary constituents, Harris explored the other possibility. After identification of the phonemes and morphemes of the language, utterances should be described as sequences of morphemes and morpheme* classes. The test to determine classes of morphemes and sequences of morphemes is substitutability. He studies the frames and fillers. For example, in Shaw bought car,

car belongs to the form class noun. It can be replaced by red shirt, where red belongs to the form class A (adjective) and shirt to N (noun). In a sense car is equivalent to red shirt. This relationship can be stated by means of an equation. AN = N

Harris then goes on manipulating the frame and the fillers and ends up with more formulae to take care of all the classes he set up. He can give more information than the IC diagram. See the example below:

Harris's contribution is in making his procedures explicit and rigorous. He worked upwards rather than downwards in the analysis. He used the notion of distribution in phonology and the same notion in morphology and syntax. He describes utterances directly by means of formulae representing classes of morphemes and sequence of morphemes. This enabled Harris to make generalizations about the structure of utterances and related structures.

With the publication of The Structure of English Fries was able to convince the
public that linguistics has many insights to offer and that these insights were readily
available for anyone who cared to find out. He divided the items of speech into two
broad classes - form classes and function classes. The former are four in number
and are numbered as class i, class 2, class 3 and class 4. As these are open-ended
new numbers or entries can be admitted at any time. The function classes are fifteen
in number. These are closed sets. Fries claimed that the ICs of a sentence could be
discovered by using the structure signals and the form classes of words. Given a
sentence like ,

This particular social event of the season usually claims the full attention of the students who stay in town.

Fries proceeds as follows:

Step 1. Identify the parts of speech of function words and mark intonation patterns.

Step 2. Mark special ties that are signaled by the structure.

Step 3. Identify the sentence pattern.

Step 4. Identify the class 1 words before and after class 2 words (that is the

Subject and the object)

Step 5&6. Cut off sequence signals and included sentences. Step 7. Cut off between class 1 word with its modifiers and class 2 word with its

(

modifiers. Step 8. Cut off between class 1 word and its modifiers in this order: i. Modifiers that follow class 1 word, ii. Modifiers that precede class 1 word.

Step 9. Cut off between class 2 word and its modifiers in this order: i. Modifiers that precede class 2 word, ii. Modifiers that follow class 2 word. Step 10. Cut off between words in word groups previously treated as single units.

Limitations \

First there is the question of selecting the right frame to test substitutability. Second there is the problem of selecting the first 'noun' or 'class V word so that we can say that the other 'nouns' can be substituted for it. Third, it is not possible to find items, which are substitutable for each other in all the environments. Further, the substitutions have to be made by observing a constraint that has not been made explicit. Fifth, when there are several different ways of making the cuts, there is no special reason for preferring one to the other. Sixth, in cases of ambiguity the IC analysis does not illuminate the structure; on the contrary, it obscures it. Seventh, the formula tends to be at least as long as the sentence whose structure it seeks to represent. Eighth, if there are infinitely many sentences in a language, there are infinitely many formulae, creating problems of storage and learning in the brain. Ninth, if the function words determine whether a sentence is English or not, even nonsense words inserted in a sentence can be considered authentic English. Unaided by many other factors, function words and structural meaning alone cannot confer sentence hood on utterances in a language. Tenth, this mechanism is not adequate to describe patterns within patterns. Lastly, although meaning seems to have been ignored, it is always resorted to in arriving at the proper frames and substitutions.

IC analysis compelled scholars like Chomsky to think deeply and differently to arrive at more precise and more elegant analyses and descriptions of language.

QUESTIONS

1. Give an account of the structuralist view of grammar.

2. What is IC analysis. Explain its important features.
3. Write a note on the different kinds of ICs.

4. Comment on the contribution made by any one of the structuralists.

5. What are the limitations of IC analysis?