We see the trees, but not the forest. We may miss the meaning for a number of reasons. We may not know the meaning of certain words or the concepts to which they refer. Even when we understand the words, we may come away with little understanding because the writing itself is particularly complex. In this latter instance, it is often helpful to apply grammatical analysis, to consciously attempt to break the sentence into meaningful units.
All English sentences follow the same basic formula.
All speakers of the language are familiar with that formula, and yet this model is rarely if ever taught. The discussion here lays that formula out. The discussion of noun phrases demonstrated the need to recognize grammatical constructions as complete units. There we were concerned with a single grammatical construction irrespective of where it appeared within a sentence. This section looks more broadly at the sentence as a whole.