Nominal group (functional grammar)

In systemic functional grammar (SFG), a nominal group is a group of words which expresses an entity, for example "The nice old English police inspector who was sitting at the table is Mr Morse". Grammatically here, "The nice old English police inspector who was sitting at the table" functions as a nominal group and acts like the subject of the sentence. A nominal group is widely regarded as synonymous to noun phrase in other grammatical models, although the coiner of the term, Halliday, and some of his followers draw a theoretical distinction between the terms group and phrase. He argues that "A phrase is different from a group in that, whereas a group is an expansion of a word, a phrase is a contraction of a clause". Halliday borrowed the term group from the linguist/classicist Sydney Allen.