Thingless Nominal Group Embedded As Qualifier

Cf. one too few legs, one too many drinks, one drink too many.

 Woke Alert: May cause offence to unidexters.

Marked Textual Structure Of A Nominal Group

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 387, 397):

Textual meaning is embodied throughout the entire structure, since it determines the order in which the elements are arranged, as well as patterns of information structure just as in the clause (note, for example, that the unmarked focus of information in a nominal group is on the word that comes last, not the word that functions as Thing. This means that there is a certain potential for assigning experientially similar meanings different textual statuses within the structure of the nominal group. …

Initial position is thematic; and the natural theme of a process or participant is its relation to the here-and-now. Final position is informative; and the newsworthy component of a process or participant is some aspect of its lexical content. So the structure of groups recapitulates, in the fixed ordering of their elements, the meaning that is incorporated as choice in the message structure of the clause.

Theme Will Tear Us Apart Again

But in Halliday ± Matthiessen (1985, 1994, 2004, 2014), in cases of predicated Theme, the embedded clause is also analysed for Theme:

Decoding And Encoding The Self