Confusing Nominal Group Head With Thing

Fawcett (2010: 222n):

²² … Rather similarly, while there is a very strong probability that a nominal group will have a head, some nominal groups do not. … But if we were to decide that we wished to say that two in Give me two was a head, we would need to have a realisation statement of the form: 'If Feature A is selected the realisation is X, but if Feature B is selected the realisation is Y', in order to cover the cases where of them was and was not made overt. The realisation rules for cardinals are already quite complicated (to accommodate cases such as around fifty, five thousand two hundred, over five thousand two hundred etc.), and it is therefore preferable to avoid the unnecessary additional complication of having two (and so every other cardinal) expound two different elements. And the same general principle applies to the very rich, the poor, the old and infirm, etc. …On these grounds (and others) it is greatly preferable to build into the grammar the possibility of having occasional nominal groups that have no head and clauses that have no Main Verb. Allowing for this avoids losing many useful generalisations such as those identified above. Note, however, that this is only possible when the grammar works by locating elements at places, rather than relying on the presence of some "anchor" element in relation to which all other elements are ordered.

Blogger Comments:

[1] This is misleading, because it is untrue. In SFL Theory, all nominal groups have a logical Head, though not all nominal groups have an experiential Thing; see further below.

[2] To be clear, in SFL Theory, two in Give me two is the Head of a nominal group, and the realisation statement is simply conflate Head/Numerative. In SFL Theory, the structures of these nominal groups are analysed as follows:

[3] To be clear, in SFL Theory, the realisation statement for these instances is conflate Head/Epithet. In SFL Theory, the structures of these nominal groups are analysed as follows:

[4] To be clear, Fawcett's Main Verb corresponds to the Predicator in SFL Theory, and SFL Theory accommodates the absence of a Predicator, whether through ellipsis or in some relational clauses. For example, Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 476):

With the additive, the Process of a relational dependent clause may be implicit; the marker is the conjunctive preposition with (positive) or without (negative):

||| I told the whole story of the six-minute Louvre at The Kennedy Centre || with President Carter there … |||

||| Without chlorine in the antarctic stratosphere, || there would be no ozone hole. |||

[5] This is misleading, because it is untrue. As demonstrated above, and previously, Fawcett makes this claim on the basis of his misunderstandings of SFL Theory.