The Pivotal Element Of The Nominal Group

 Fawcett (2010: 203, 203n):

The nominal group has as its pivotal element either a noun, a pronoun or a proper name. The latter, however, is not in fact an item (as a noun and a pronoun are) but a unit. It is most frequently the unit of the human proper name cluster, which has its own internal structure. (For this see Section 10.2.12).

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To be clear, in Fawcett's model, the pivotal element of the nominal group is the head. Fawcett (p304) identifies the elements of the nominal group as follows:

In Fawcett's model (p226), structural elements of the unit 'nominal group' are expounded (realised) by items (words and morphemes):

The third of the three major categories in the present theory of syntax (with 'unit' and 'element') is the item. This term includes both 'word' (in its traditional sense) and 'morpheme'. …

In the present theory of syntax, the lowest syntactic category on each branch of the tree in a tree diagram representation of a sentence is an element (e.g., the head of a nominal group). And each such lowest element is expounded by an item — or as we shall see shortly, by items (in the plural).

In other words, despite Fawcett's claims to the contrary, his model assumes a de facto rank scale of (at least):

1. clause,
2. (class of) unit,
3. item.