ABSTRACT
The nominal group2 is a relatively understudied area of the grammar within systemic functional linguistics (SFL). There has been very little dedicated attention3 given to grammatical units below the clause within SFL, with the exception of Tucker (1998) on the lexicogrammar of adjectives, Bache (2008) on the verbal group (focusing on tense and aspect), and Fontaine and Jones (forthcoming), who examine referring expressions. The relative lack of a concentrated body of work on this grammatical unit is surprising since it plays such an important role, serving to express the participating entities, in the clause and in discourse. It carries the majority of the lexical content in any text and, as has been established in several studies, it is a sensitive index of register (Biber et al. 1998; Fontaine 2007).
