Nominal group (functional grammar)

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), which 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.

[6] The nominal group is a structure which includes nouns, adjectives, numerals and determiners, which is associated with the thing under description (a.k.a.

The term noun has a narrower purview and is detached from any notion of entity description.

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.

English is a highly nominalised language, and thus lexical meaning is largely carried in nominal groups.

[10] 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 is occurring/ it occurs).

[13] 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".

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.

As Halliday points out, "the more permanent the attribute of a thing, the less likely it is to identify it in a particular context"[14] (that is, of the speech event).

This pattern from transient specification to permanent attribute explains why the items are ordered as they are in a nominal group.

The logic of the group in English is recursive, based on successive subsets:[15] working leftwards from the head, the first question that can be asked is "what kind of apples?"

Here the recursive logic changes, since this is a multivariate, not a univariate, nominal group—the question now is "How many beautiful shiny Jonathan apples?"

In contrast, the logical questions of a univariate group would be unchanged right through, typical of long strings of nouns in news headlines and signage[16] ("International departure lounge ladies' first-class washroom").