In systemic functional grammar (SFG), a nominal group is a group of words that represents or describes an entity, for example The nice old English police inspector who was sitting at the table with Mr Morse. Grammatically, the wording "The nice old English police inspector who was sitting at the table with Mr Morse" can be understood as a nominal group (a description of someone), and functions as the subject of the information exchange and as the person being identified as "Mr Morse". A nominal group is widely regarded as synonymous with noun phrase in other grammatical models. However, there are two major differences between the functional notion of a nominal group and the formal notion of a noun phrase that must be taken into account. Firstly, the coiner of the term, Halliday, and some of his followers draw a theoretical distinction between the terms group and phrase. Halliday argues that "A phrase is different from a group in that, whereas a group is an expansion of a word, a phrase is a contraction of a clause". Halliday borrowed the term group from the linguist/classicist Sydney Allen. In the second place, the functional notion of nominal group differs from the formal notion of noun phrase because the first is anchored on the thing being described whereas the second is anchored on word classes. For that reason, one can analyse the nominal groups some friends and a couple of friends very similarly in terms of function: a thing/entity quantified in an imprecise fashion; whereas one must recognise some friends as being a simple noun phrase and a couple of friends as being a noun phrase embedded in another noun phrase (one noun phrase per noun). In short, these notions are different even if formalists do not perceive them as different.
The rank scale in SFG SFG postulates a rank scale, in which the highest unit is the clause and the lowest is the morpheme: coming from the largest unit down, we can divide the parts of a clause into groups and phrases; and coming from the smallest units up, we can group morphemes into words. Typically, groups are made out of words while phrases are made out of groups: e.g. clause constituents (the apples) (are) (on the chair), phrase constituents (on) (the chair), group constituents (the) (apples), word constituents (apple)(s). In that sense, each unit of a rank typically consists of one or more units of the rank below, not of the same rank (see rank-shifting section for exceptions to this typical pattern). At group/phrase rank besides nominal group, there are also the "verbal group", the "adverbial group", the "prepositional group" (e.g. from under), and the "prepositional phrase" (e.g. from under the sofa). The term 'nominal' in 'nominal group' was adopted because it denotes a wider class of phenomena than the term noun. The nominal group is a structure which includes nouns, adjectives, numerals and determiners, which is associated with the thing under description (a.k.a. entity), and whose supporting logic is Description logic. The term noun has a narrower purview and is detached from any notion of entity description. For instance, the words bit/bits in a bit of time, a little bit of peanut butter, and bits of information can be understood as a noun, but they can hardly be understood as representing some entity on its own. In that sense, these words shall be understood as being the head of a "noun phrase" in a formalist account of grammar, but as a portion of some substance in a nominal group. Since formal linguists are interested in the recurring patterns of word classes such as "a" + "[noun]" and not in the way humans describe entities, they recruit the term "noun phrase" for their grammatical descriptions, a structure defined as a pattern around a noun, and not as a way of describing an entity such as the "nominal group". In other words, given the different architectures of language that are assumed by functional and formal theories of language, the terms "noun phrase" and "nominal group" must be seen to be doing quite different descriptive work. For instance, these group/phrase elements are re-interpreted as functional categories, in the first instance as process, participant and circumstance, with the nominal group as the pre-eminent structure for the expression of participant roles in discourse. Within Halliday's functionalist classification of this structure, he identifies the functions of Deictic, Numerative, Epithet, Classifer and Thing. The word classes which typically realise these functions are set out in the table below:
Within a clause, a definite nominal group functions as if it were a proper noun. The proper noun (or the common noun when there is no proper noun) functions as the head of the nominal group; all other constituents work as modifiers of the head. The modifiers preceding the head are called premodifiers and the ones after it postmodifiers. The modifiers that represent a circumstance such as a location are called qualifiers. In English, most postmodifiers are qualifiers. In the following example of a nominal group, the head is bolded.
Those five beautiful shiny Jonathan apples sitting on the chair English is a highly nominalised language, and thus lexical meaning is largely carried in nominal groups. This is partly because of the flexibility of these groups in encompassing premodifiers and qualification, and partly because of the availability of a special resource called the thematic equative, which has evolved as a means of packaging the message of a clause in the desired thematic form (for example, the clause [What attracts her to the course] is [the depth of understanding it provides] is structured as [nominal group A] = [nominal group B]). Many things are most readily expressed in nominal constructions; this is particularly so in registers that have to do with the world of science and technology, where things, and the ideas behind them, are multiplying and proliferating all the time.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
