Chapter : Phrase Structure Grammar *

To understand the properties of modern phrase structure grammars, it is useful to place their development in a wider formal and historical context. Phrase structure grammars and associated notions of phrase structure analysis have their proximate origins in models of Immediate Constituent (IC) analysis. Although inspired by the programmatic syntactic remarks in Bloomfield (), these models were principally developed by Bloomfield’s successors, most actively in the decade between the publication of Wells () and the advent of transformational analyses in Harris () and Chomsky (). The central intuition underlying models of IC analysis was that the structure of an expression could be exhibited by dividing the expression into parts (its immediate constituents), further subdividing these parts, and continuing until syntactically indivisible units were obtained. This style of analysis was motivated in part by a belief in the  of syntactic relations, in particular the view that the most important relations held between immediate constituents.