Needlessly Rebranding Halliday's 'Numerative' As The Authors' 'Focus'

 Martin, Matthiessen & Painter (2010: 170): 

Nominal group expansions of this kind are very common, and we’ll suggest an analysis here that treats these structures as having an embedded nominal group with the multivariate function Focus; in these nominal groups of functions as a structure marker, signalling the embedding (there is no need to label it separately in the analysis).

 

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, on the one hand, this is an unnecessary rebranding of the term Numerative; Halliday (1994: 195): 

On the other hand, the term 'Focus' is a very poor choice, because the term is already in use in the theory (the Focus of New information), and in this usage, the term does not construe experiential meaning. Moreover, it creates unnecessary confusion because the unmarked Focus of such a nominal group is on the other element, the Thing: