I'm trying to learn grammar using Internet tutorials, and it appears to be the consensus that sentences consist of a subject, verb, and often an object. And in the simple examples provided by the tutorials, identifying the sentence structure is always easy:
The dog (subject) eats (verb) a bone (object)
But I'm never able to do it in my own writing. For example, I can identify the subject "we" the verb "develop" and object "Y" in the sentence below, but I have no clue what the rest is.
By combining X, we develop Y, which allows us to use Z to build R that can be combined with S to allow T.
Can someone label the sentence structure of the sentence above, so that I know the names of things that I should lookup, or refer me to some good literature that defines grammar. I have a background in Computer Science and Math, so something formal (maybe using formal grammars) would be very useful.
My motivation is that I'm currently trying to learn how to write better (using the book "Style The Basics of Clarity and Grace"). The book contains sentences such as "you underlined abstract nouns as simple subject" and I would like to know what those kind of things are. Therefore, I would like to be able to label components of sentences with their appropriate linguistic names. I think that a formal grammar would help me do this (given by background), but it doesn't have to handle extreme edge cases, or be at the bleeding edge of linguistic research.