Words in an utterance form various syntagmatic connections with one another.
One should distinguish between syntagmatic groupings of notional words alone, syntagmatic groupings of notional words with functional words, and syntagmatic groupings of functional words alone.
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. Different combinations of notional words (notional phrases) have a clearly pronounced self-dependent nominative destination, they denote complex phenomena and their properties in their inter-connections.
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.
Given a phrase structure grammar , IC-analysis divides up a sentence into major parts or immediate constituents, and these constituents are in turn divided into further immediate constituents. The process continues until irreducible constituents are reached, i.e., until each constituent consists of only a word or a meaningful part of a word. The end result of IC-analysis is often presented in a visual diagrammatic form that reveals the hierarchical immediate constituent structure of the sentence at hand.
An important aspect of IC-analysis in phrase structure grammars is that each individual word is a constituent by definition. The process of IC-analysis always ends when the smallest constituents are reached, which are often words (although the analysis can also be extended into the words to acknowledge the manner in which words are structured). The process is, however, much different in dependency grammars, since many individual words do not end up as constituents in dependency grammars.
