theory of Immediate Constituents (IC) was originally elaborated as an
attempt to determine the ways in which lexical units are relevantly related to one
another. It was discovered that combinations of such units are usually structured
into hierarchically arranged sets of binary constructions. For example in the word-
group
a black dress in severe style we do not relate
a to
black, black to dress, dress to
in, etc. but set up a structure which may be represented as
a black dress / i n severe style. Thus the fundamental aim of IC analysis is to segment a set of
lexical units into two maximally independent sequences or ICs thus revealing the
hierarchical structure of this set. Successive segmentation results in Ultimate
Constituents (UC), i.e. two-facet units that cannot be segmented into smaller units
having both sound-form and meaning. The Ultimate Constituents of the word-
