I think that your analysis is posssible, but I still prefer the analysis with "one year" as modifying "before".
Tom's Reasoning:
(1) Compare "three times before they were married they went on holiday together", which means that each time individually was before they got married. In this case "before they got married" is a modifier in the ngp with "time" [sic] as head.
(2) In "Three years before they got married" this is not the case, there is only one occasion. We are told something happened before they got married and additionally how long before.
(3) However, in the seemingly similar sentence "The year before they got married they bought a house together" I would analyse "before they got married" as an embedded clause within the noun group "the year before they got married". Something happened in a particular year which is defined as being the one before their wedding.
Blogger Comments:
Tom's analyses in (1) and (3) are consistent with Halliday's analysis. That is:
three times [[before they were married]]
the year [[before they got married]]
However, his claim that three years before they got married is not the same grammatically, ie
three years [[before they got married]]
is not consistent with Halliday's analysis.
More significantly, the argumentation that Tom uses to support his different analysis is entirely spurious. There is no grammatical reasoning involved. Instead, the grammatical difference is said to turn on the distinction between:
"each time individually was before they got married" and
"something happened in a particular year which is defined as being the one before their wedding"
versus:
"something happened before they got married and additionally how long before".
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