The best analysis finds simplicity at the heart of things: this is really just that. We analyze something not to have merely a thousand fragments, but to discover the system of what we’re looking at, a body of facts organized around a set of principles. That’s true with any science, including the science of grammar.
The grammar of prose, by which we mean the way the elements of an everyday sentence are connected to communicate a certain meaning, is built on the principle of assertion, the joining of one thing into some kind of association with another thing (the verb assert derives from a Latin verb that means exactly that, to join or claim). That is why the first step in analyzing a sentence is to identify the number of clauses it comprises, because each clause, the joining of a subject and verb, constitutes one thought; if we can understand each thought, or assertion, in itself, we can more easily understand the relationship of thought to thought within the same sentence and, more largely, within the same paragraph.
To illustrate this interconnection of elements in a prose statement, let’s look at a sentence I came upon recently. It is grammatically sound (with one questionable usage, as we’ll see), but it is not particularly well stylized, which will make it all the better as an example for grammatical analysis: The one trait which each hotel on my vacation shared was how poorly I slept while I was there. If we want to understand how this sentence is put together, in order to revise it, perhaps, into something better, where in the world would we begin? So many ideas seem to be whirling around that it’s difficult at first to find its center, or even its subject. But here is where we are to rely on the principle of simplicity, and analyze under the assumption that the bony grammatical structure is not as intricate as the neural network which carries the particular meaning of the statement.
After reading the sentence through again, we find these four verbs: shared, was, slept, and was. Three of them are part of subordinate clauses (shared in the relative clause which each hotel on my vacation shared; slept in the noun clause how poorly I slept; and was in the adverbial clause while I was there); that, then, leaves the first instance of was to be reckoned with as the main verb. If that assumption is true, then it’s likely we’re looking at a simple statement of identity, with a subject merely being equated with a noun in the predicate through the copula was. And that, in fact, is what we do find: the subject the one trait which each hotel on my vacation shared is being identified with the state or situation of how poorly I slept while I was there. The essential structure of this nineteen-word sentence, then, is simply subject + was + predicate, no more complicated ultimately than the hotel was a mess.
There remains, though, that questionable usage I mentioned earlier, and my guess is that this is what makes this sentence difficult at first sight. The predicate opens with the subordinate clause how poorly I slept, and that clause begins with the word how. We called this section a noun clause because it functions as a noun, even though its first word, how, is really an adverb. Traditional grammar says we can do this (we might easily say, for example, I saw how fast he was driving), but when the construction makes a statement unnecessarily complicated, a simpler design should be considered: The one trait which each hotel on my vacation shared was that I slept so poorly while I was there. By changing how to that, we are using the conjunction more regularly associated with a noun clause (as we often see in a sentence like I saw that he was busy), and by transferring the idea of degree originally in how to the adverb so, we have smoothed out the sentence without changing its simple structure. Still not a good sentence, but better.
And to look for simplicity of structure, no matter its elaboration in detail, should be our goal.
***