Nominal group (language)
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"Those five beautiful shiny Jonathan apples sitting on the chair"

In English, a nominal group typically comprises a noun surrounded by other items (words) that all in some way characterise that noun. 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 postmodifiers.1 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 pre- and postmodifiers, 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 form2 (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.3

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Pre- and postmodifiers

The head does not have to be modified to constitute a group in this technical sense.4 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 postmodifiers ("apples sitting on the chair"), and the full structure of premodifiers, head, and postmodifiers, as above.

In this example, the premodifiers characterise the head on what is known as the uppermost rank (see Ranking below). In some traditional grammars, all of these items, except for "Those", are referred to as adjectives; however, each has a quite different grammatical function. 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. Interpersonal epithets tend to precede the experiential ones in a nominal group. "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.5

Ranking

The postmodifiers here contain information that is downranked. Returning to the original example above, "on the chair" is a prepositional phrase embedded within the nominal group; this prepositional phrase itself contains a nominal group ("the chair"), comprising the head ("chair"), and a deictic ("the") which indicates whether some specific subset of the head is intended (here, a specific chair we can identify from the context).6 By contrast, "Those" is a deictic on the uppermost rank and is applied to the head on the uppermost rank, "apples"; here, "those" means "You know which apples I mean—the ones over there".

Nominalisation as a choice

Writing commonly presents choices of whether to nominalise a construction. For example, each item in the following list starts with a verb (in bold face):

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These verbs could be nominalised to convey a more formal, permanent, stable sense of an action or process, as though each were an object or thing, rather than the active, dynamic, "doing" sense conveyed by the "-ing" verbs:

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The nominalisation of actions and processes is slightly more common in written language, which tends to express meanings as more stable, permanent states. By contrast, the first example above, in which the actions or processes are expressed as verbs, is more common in spoken language, which is good at expressing meanings as dynamic and changing.7 In both writing and speech, the cost of such nominalisation—in the greater number of words and the more elaborate construction—must be weighed against the advantage of conveying the subtly different angle.

See also

References

  1. ^ Halliday MAK (2004) Introduction to functional grammar, Third Edition, London, Hodder Arnold, 311–12
  2. ^ Halliday MAK (1985/94) Spoken and written language, Deakin University Press, 72
  3. ^ Halliday MAK (1985/94) Spoken and written language, Deakin University Press, 73
  4. ^ Bloor T, Bloor M (2004) The functional analysis of English, 2nd Ed, London, Edward Arnold, 31
  5. ^ Halliday MAK (2004) Introduction to functional grammar, 3rd Ed, London, Hodder Arnold, 317–20
  6. ^ Halliday MAK (2004) Introduction to functional grammar, 3rd ed, London, Hodder Arnold, 312
  7. ^ Halliday MAK (1985/94) Spoken and written language, Deakin University Press, 75
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