Misrepresenting Halliday (1994) On 'Classes Of Group'

Fawcett (2010: 99):

So far we have looked for the "basic concepts" in the opening chapters of IFG — and without much success. … However, there are two alternative approaches to locating the "basic concepts' of a book which turn out to yield more interesting results. These are to count the entries for each major concept in the book's index, and to read the text with a constant eye to the concepts that underlie it. 

Let us take as out starting point the index entries for the four 'categories'. The concept of 'unit' has just six entries, all being in the first twenty-five pages of this 434-page book. As for the concept of 'class', the word-form "class" also occurs frequently in the early pages (pp. 25-30). However, it is usually being used in the context of the highly generalised discussion of the differences between 'class-oriented' and 'function-oriented' grammars that we noted above. The word "class" in fact only occurs once with the technical meaning of 'class of unit' (on p. 214), and even then the reference is to 'word classes', rather than to the more controversial issue of 'classes of group'. Indeed, the concept of 'class of group' does not appear explicitly at all. 

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[1] To remind the reader, Fawcett is here looking for the basic concepts of Halliday's previous theory, Scale & Category Grammar (1961), in a book (IFG ) that exemplifies the deployment of Halliday's later theory, Systemic Functional Grammar (1994), and that explicitly states (1994: xxvii) it is not an account of the theory.

[2] This is misleading, because it is the direct opposite of what is true.  For example, Halliday (1994: 180; 274):

In this chapter we shall examine the structure of the three main classes of group: nominal group, verbal group and adverbial group; along with a brief reference to preposition and conjunction groups. …

Groups and phrases form complexes the same way that clauses do, by parataxis or hypotaxis. Only elements having the same function can be linked in this way. Typically this will mean members of the same class: verbal group with verbal group, nominal group with nominal group and so on.

To be clear, as Halliday (1994: 27-8; 24) explains in Chapter 2:

With minimal bracketing (ranked constituent analysis) … the notion of constituency is being made to carry less of the burden of interpretation. …

… if we are using minimal bracketing some other concept is being brought in in order to explain the grammatical structure. This is where the concept of FUNCTION is introduced.

Accordingly, in SFL theory, formal constituency is modelled as a rank scale, and each unit — clause, group/phrase etc. — serves as the entry condition to a system of functions.  This is why Halliday (1994) takes the units of clause and group/phrase as the point of entry in his demonstration of grammatical functions.