A Deconstructed Sentence

Here is a sentence which will be deconstructed into its component parts.

The green sports car skidded suddenly, hit the river with a bang and disappeared.

The first word to identify is the Head Word. This will almost invariably be a Noun and will also be the subject of your sentence.

The Head Word in the sentence above is car.

Now we must find the verb which explains what action the noun takes. In this case it is skidded. The simplest form of this sentence would be the car skidded.

More information about the car is given by pre-modifiers and qualifiers. The noun together with pre-modifier and qualifier make up a noun phrase.

A pre-modifier is also known as an adjective - a word which describes a noun.

The noun phrase in this case is the green sports car. A noun phrase will not ordinarily have a verb.

A determiner (such as the or a) is what is also known as an article.

Now with the noun phrase and the verb we can elaborate upon the verb - how did it skid? It skidded suddenly. An adverb describes a verb and suddenly describes the verb skidded.

Our sentence is now the green sports car skidded suddenly. This is a sentence on its own, but there is more information to come.
The car hit the river with a bang would also be a sentence on its own. However by linking the two parts together with an adverb of time, the most important part is described as the main clause and the minor part is described as the subordinate clause.

So, two separate sentences joined together each become clauses and the whole unit becomes a sentence. The clause with the head word or the most important meaning is called the main clause and the other is called the subordinate clause. and disappeared is yet another subordinate clause. Further clues to their being separate clauses are provided by the comma (after suddenly) and the conjunction and.

Notice that the first subordinate clause contains a phrase which describes how the car hit the river - with a bang. Because it describes the verb hit we describe it as an adverbial phrase. An adverb describes a verb.

Verbs take different tenses. In the sentence above skidded and hit are the simple past tense of the verbs skid and hit. "has skidded" would be the present perfect tense and "hitting" would be the present continuous tense.

Here is the final annotated sentence. The main and the two subordinate clauses are shown on separate lines because they are the most important divisions of sentence structure.

determiner	pre-mod	pre-mod	noun	pp verb	adverb
The	green	sports	car	skidded	suddenly
|-------------------------------------noun phrase ---------------------|				|-------- verb phrase ----|

verb	determiner	noun	conjunction	determiner	noun
hit	the	river	with	a	bang
verb phrase	|---- noun phrase ---|		|-----------------  adverbial phrase ---------|

Deconstructing a sentence need not take this long nor always be in this level of detail. However breaking the parts into smaller pieces can show how complex a sentence is and in turn can indicate whether a child would easily understand it, whether it is likely to be formal or informal register, if it is written or spoken etc.