Misrepresenting IFG On Nominal Groups Embedded In Nominal Groups

Fawcett (2010: 289, 290):

The second part of Figure 25 that I shall comment on is the quality group very experienced. Here one group, a quality group, functions to fill an element of another group, a nominal group. Texts in English are in fact full of nominal groups that have within them other groups — and not just as qualifiers, which is all that IFG states is permitted. See Tucker (1998) for the fullest treatment in any theory of language of adjectives and the structures into which they enter. He demonstrates conclusively the value of the approach taken here to this major and hitherto understudied area of syntax — an area for which he has now provided the definitive description in SFL terms.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, in SFL Theory, Fawcett's quality group is an Epithet, which from a logical perspective, involves submodification:

[2] This is misleading, because it is untrue. On the one hand, less importantly, rankshifted nominal groups serving as Qualifier are relatively rare; it is rankshifted prepositional phrases and clauses that most frequently serve as Qualifier. On the other hand, more importantly, IFG (Halliday 1994: 195, 196) provides the following examples of rankshifted nominal groups serving as elements other than Qualifier:

[3] To be clear, no matter how valuable the work of Tucker, it cannot represent "the definitive description in SFL terms", because it is framed within the approach of the Cardiff Grammar, which has been demonstrated to be inconsistent with SFL Theory.