Nominal Group (functional Grammar) - The Rank Scale in SFG

The Rank Scale in SFG

SFG postulates a 'rank scale', in which the highest unit is the clause, and the lowest is the morpheme. The intermediate units are groups/phrases, and words. Each unit of scale is said to consist of one or more units of the rank below. At group/phrase rank, Halliday proposes also the "verbal group", the "adverbial group", and the "prepositional phrase". 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. The term "noun" has a narrower purview. Formal linguists recruit the term noun phrase for their grammatical descriptions. Given the significant differences in the theoretical architecture in functionalist and formalist theories, the terms 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 nominal group functions as though it is that noun, which is referred to as the head; the items preceding the head are called the premodifiers, and the items after it the qualifier. 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 is is structured as = ). 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.