New Extensions of Bloomfield's Immediate Constituent Analysis
Bo Liu · Journal of North University of China · 2012
The paper is on the tentative extension of the Immediate Constituent Analysis(IC Analysis) proposed by Bloomfield,an American structuralist in linguistics from the perspective of revealing mathematic relations in natural language.Compared with the original IC Analysis,two breakthroughs are made in the paper by means of studying the analogy between characteristics of IC binary trees and those of binary trees as a data structure,employing mathematic inferences and related formulas,and establishing correlation between nodes and levels in the tree diagram and their counterparts including linguistic units and stratifications in natural language(English).These breakthroughs include the classification of the binary tree applied in IC Analysis and revelation of mathematical relations between linguistic units or constituents(represented by nodes) and linguistic stratifications(represented by levels in the tree diagram).Besides,hypotheses on multi-division and implications for the extended IC analysis used in teaching and computer processing of natural language are also proposed.