Rebranding Halliday's 'Extended Numerative' As Martin's 'Focus'

Martin & Rose (2007: 97):

Finally, we must also account for various ‘of’ structures in nominal groups. These include facets (the side of the house), measures (a glass of beer), types (a make of car), and so on. For simplicity we will label all these here as Focus. Like Classifier Thing structures, Focus Thing structures also comprise a single lexical element:

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here Martin & Rose rebrand Halliday's extended Numerative as "their" Focus. Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 395):

Moreover, the rebranding is not only unmotivated theoretically, but it is also a poor choice of term, since it is already in use in SFL theory as the focus of New in an information unit.

[2] To be clear, here the criterion for nuclearity switches back from syntagm (structural proximity) to lexis ("a single lexical element"), the inconsistency again demonstrating that the authors do not understand the principle on which nuclearity is based.

As can be seen, each of the authors' example nominal groups features more than one lexical item, and none of the three nominal groups constitutes a lexical item specified by the most delicate lexicogrammatical features.

As can also be seen, this is grammar within the clause, not discourse semantics, not meaning beyond the clause.