English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
The sentence I need to parse:
"Had" is the Past Tense of the verb to "have".
I can see that "Had" is the subject. But what part of the sentence is the predicate?
Am I right thinking that "Past" is the attribute of the sentence?
What is "of the verb to 'have'"? Is it the object?
Your sentence (I've corrected some minor capitalisation and punctuation issues):
"Had" is the past tense of the verb "to have".
You correctly note that "Had" is the subject. This is a mentioned word, which is why there are quote marks. The predicate is the part of the sentence that tells you about the subject. The predicate is
is the past tense of the verb "to have"
The word "past" is an adjective, here it is modifying the noun "tense". Sentences don't have attributes, but an adjective gives an attribute to a noun. The phrase "past tense" is stable enough to be considered a compound, so you can consider "past tense" to be one word.
"of the word "have" is a prepositional phrase, and it modifies the noun phrase "past tense". It tells you which word's past tense you are discussing. Compare this with
This is a hair of my dog.
This [subject] is [verb] (a hair) [noun] (of my dog)[prep phrase]
The structure is broadly the same.
