Nominal Group (functional Grammar) - Three Metafunctions in The Nominal Group

Three Metafunctions in The Nominal Group

Like the English clause, the nominal group is a combination of three distinct functional components, or metafunctions, which express three largely independent sets of semantic choice: the ideational (what the clause or nominal group is about); the interpersonal (what the clause is doing as a verbal exchange between speaker and listener, or writer and reader); and the textual (how the message is organised—how it relates to the surrounding text and the context in which it occurring). In a clause, each metafunction is a virtually complete structure, and the three structures combine into one in interpretation. However, beneath the clause—in phrases and in groups, such as the nominal group—the three structures are incomplete of themselves and need to be interpreted separately, "as partial contributions to a single structural line". In nominal groups, the ideational structure is by far the most significant in premodifying the head. To interpret premodification, it is necessary to split the ideational metafunction into two dimensions: the experiential and the logical.