【正确答案】This notion of immediate constituents was proposed by the American linguist Leonard Boomfield in his Language, first published in 1993. Immediate constituent analysis may be defined as: the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents—word groups (or phrases), which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached. In practice, however, for sake of convenience, we usually stop at the level of word.
The immediate constituent analysis of a sentence may be carried out with brackets as:
(a)((poor) (john)) ((ran) (away))
It may also be more easily shown with a tree diagram:
(b)

【答案解析】[解析] 本题考查直接成分分析法。直接成分这个概念是由美国语言学家布龙菲尔德在其出版的《语言论》中提出来的。直接成分分析法主张先把句子分析为直接成分，层层切分，直到最终成分为止。但实际操作中为了方便，我们通常切到词为止。句子的直接成分分析法可以用括弧，亦可用树形图来表示。通过IC分析法，句子的内在结构可以清晰的展示出来，如果有歧义也会被揭示出来。当然，IC分析法也存在着问题。