Immediate Constituent Structure, Major Constituent Structure and Flat Structure

This paper reviews and critiques the development and evolution of Chinese sentence analysis theories over forty years. Since the early 1980s, Immediate Constituent Analysis (ICA) has comprehensively replaced Head Word Analysis and become the mainstream for analyzing Chinese sentences. However, ICA exhibits certain limitations, such as excessive segmentation and ignoring the integrity of structure. To address these issues, Lu Bingfu (1981, 1993) proposed Major Constituents Analysis (MCA), which optimizes ICA through finite segmentation and orbital layers. In recent years, Shen Jiaxuan (2019) has advocated for the dialogical nature and paratactic relations in Chinese grammar, a novel perspective that essentially treats sentences as flat structures. Building on an in-depth understanding of the principles underlying MCA and flat structure analysis, and integrating years of personal research, we further elaborate on interpreting flat structures through three aspects: first, the segmentation of SVO sentences; second, the relationship between dislocated sentences and regular sentences; and third, the full-match of prosodic structure and grammatical structures. This paper argues that MCA, grounded in semantic analysis, represents a deeper-level grammatical framework. By combining major constituent structure with pragmatic contexts and prosodic information in language use, flat structures emerge. Fundamentally, Major constituent Structure emphasizes semantics, while flat structure prioritizes pragmatics.