Fawcett's Quantity Groups Reanalysed Using SFL Theory

 Fawcett (2010: 208):

Quantity groups in fact occur more frequently within nominal groups, as in She hasn't smoked very many cigarettes today, and it is not at all clear how this and the other types of quantity group illustrated in Appendix B would be handled in an IFG-style analysis.

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To be clear, from the perspective of SFL Theory, Fawcett's quantity group very many in the above example is a word complex serving as the Numerative of a nominal group:

Turning to Appendix B (p307), Fawcett's quantity group a great deal less than expected in a great deal less food than expected covers both the Numerative and Qualifier of a nominal group, with the Sub-Head of the Numerative premodified by an embedded nominal group:

On the other hand, Fawcett's quantity group immediately after in the Appendix B example immediately after the game is a preposition group serving as the Process/Predicator of a prepositional phrase:

whereas Fawcett's quantity group immediately after in the Appendix B example immediately after the he'd gone is a conjunction group serving as the conjunctive Adjunct of a clause:

That is, as the analyses demonstrate, in terms of SFL Theory, Fawcett's quantity group is distributed across both group classes (nominal, preposition, conjunction) and ranks (clause, phrase/group, word). On this basis, the quantity group might be said to represent a ragbag of miscellaneous functions. But importantly, proposing a quantity group results in failing to account for all the different functions that these similar forms serve.