Nominal group (language)
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Systemic functional grammar
Systemic functional grammar , a component of systemic functional linguistics , is a form of grammatical description originally developed by Michael Halliday in a career spanning more than 50 years. It is part of a social semiotic approach to language called systemic-functional linguistics...
(SFG), a nominal group is a group of word
Word
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content . This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own...
s which expresses an entity
Entity
An entity is something that has a distinct, separate existence, although it need not be a material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is animate.An entity could be viewed as a set...
. A "nominal group" is widely regarded as synonymous to noun phrase
Noun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
in other grammatical models, although Halliday and some of his followers draw a theoretical distinction between the terms group and phrase. He 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.
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 phraseNoun phrase
In grammar, a noun phrase, nominal phrase, or nominal group is a phrase based on a noun, pronoun, or other noun-like word optionally accompanied by modifiers such as adjectives....
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:
| Deictic | Deictic2 | Numerative | Epithet | Classifier | Thing |
| determiner | adjective | numeral | adjective | noun or adjective | noun |
Within a clause
Clause
In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. In some languages it may be a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in other languages in certain clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase,...
, 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
Thematic equative
In systemic functional grammar, a thematic equative is a thematic resource in which two or more separate elements in a clause are grouped together to form a single constituent of the theme-plus-rheme structure...
, 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.
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.Experiential dimension
The experiential dimension concerns how meaning is expressed in the group as the organisation of experience. The critical question is how and whether the head is modified. The head does not have to be modified to constitute a group in this technical sense. Thus, four types of nominal group are possible: the head alone ("apples"), the head with premodifiers ("Those five beautiful shiny Jonathan apples"), the head with a qualifier ("apples sitting on the chair"), and the full structure of premodification and qualification, as above.Functions of the premodifiers
In this example, the premodifiers characterise the head, on what is known as the uppermost rank (see "Rankshifting" below). In some formalFormalism
The term formalism describes an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy. A practitioner of formalism is called a formalist. A formalist, with respect to some discipline, holds that there is no transcendent meaning to that discipline other than the literal...
grammars, all of the premodifying items in the example above, except for "Those", would be referred to as adjectives, despite the fact that each item has a quite different grammatical function in the group. An epithet indicates some quality of the head: "shiny" is an experiential epithet, since it describes an objective quality that we can all experience; by contrast, "beautiful" is an interpersonal epithet, since it is an expression of the speaker's subjective attitude towards the apples, and thus partly a matter of the relationship between speaker and listener. "Jonathan" is a classifier, which indicates a particular subclass of the head (not Arkansas Black or Granny Smith apples, but Jonathan apples); a classifier cannot usually be intensified ("very Jonathan apples" is ungrammatical). "Five" is a numerator, and unlike the other three items, describes not a quality of the head but its quantity.
Ordering of the premodifiers: from speaker–now to increasingly permanent attributes
The experiential pattern in nominal groups opens with the identification of the head in terms of the immediate context of the speech event—the here-and-now—what Halliday calls "the speaker–now matrix". Take, for example, the first word of the nominal group exemplified above: "those": "those apples", as opposed to "these apples", means "you know the apples I mean—the ones over there, not close to me"; distance or proximity to the immediate speech event could also be in temporal terms (the ones we picked last week, not today), or in terms of the surrounding text (the apples mentioned in the previous paragraph in another context, not in the previous sentence in the same context as now) and the assumed background knowledge of the listener/speaker ("the apple" as opposed to "an apple" means "the one you know about"). The same function is true of other deictics, such as "my", "all", "each", "no", "some", and "either": they establish the relevance of the head—they "fix" it, as it were—in terms of the speech event.There is a progression from this opening of the nominal group, with the greatest specifying potential, through items that have successively less identifying potential and are increasingly permanent as attributes of the head. As Halliday points out, "the more permanent the attribute of a thing, the less likely it is to identify it in a particular context" (that is, of the speech event). The most permanent item, of course, is the head itself. This pattern from transient specification to permanent attribute explains why the items are ordered as they are in a nominal group. The deictic ("those") comes first; this is followed by the numerative, if there is one ("five"), since the number of apples, in this case, is the least permanent attribute; next comes the interpersonal epithet which, arising from the speaker's opinion, is closer to the speaker–now matrix than the more objectively testable experiential epithet ("shiny"); then comes the more permanent classifier ("Jonathon", a type of apple), leading to the head itself. This ordering of increasing permanence from left to right is why we are more likely to say "her new black car" than "her black new car": the newness will recede sooner than the blackness.