This paper investigates the seminal texts on Immediate Constituent Analysis and the associated diagrams. We show that the relations between the whole and its parts, that are typical of current phrase structure trees, were less prominent in the early di-agramming efforts than the relationships between units of the same level. This can be observed until the beginning of the 1960's, including in Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957). We discuss whether such analyses could be said " dependency-based " , according to an attempt to define this term.