Comparison of Descriptions of English Nominal Groups Between the Sydney Grammar and the Cardiff Grammar

Both the Sydney Grammar and the Cardiff Grammar are theoretically based on Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, and the two models have both similarities and differences in describing real language phenomena. This research discusses the similarities and the differences of the two models in depicting the nominal group in English. The two models regard the nominal group as a fundamental syntactic unit and agree that the description is functional rather than formal. However, their descriptions of the internal structure of the nominal group differ much, in terms of the functional labels and the way of describing. All these similarities and differemces can demonstrate that the two models have the same theoretical basis and have their own characteristics as well. We think that the combination of the two models in describing the English nominal group will be of great value in practice.