"A Whole Nother" and "Alls I Know Is"

[Michael Adams]

And, in addition, "a whole nother" doesn't conform to the stress/syllable constraints of English infixing, as /ae/ and /n/ are not syllables of "an." It's reanalysis, as Larry says, and as Beverly particularized. Examples of the converse reanalysis include "an umpire" (fr. Fr. noumpere), "an adder" (fr. OE naedere), and "an auger" (fr. OE naugere).

~ Michael


-----Original Message-----
From: bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Sent: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 9:34 AM
Subject: Re: "A Whole Nother" and "Alls I Know Is"


On 10/5/06, John M. Spartz <jspartz at purdue.edu> wrote:
> > Katherine Hageland writes:
> >
> > >I'm a PhD graduate student taking my first linguistics class in many, many
> > >years. I guess I'm the traditional non-traditional student. I constantly
> > >hear people saying "a whole nother" when they mean something like "That's
> > >a whole other ball game." I also hear people saying, "Alls I know about it
> > >is this" when they mean "All I know about it is this." I'm originally from
> > >California, but now studying in the Midwest. Are the constructions I'm
> > >hearing part of a dialect or are they some other linguistic phenomenon?
>
> I don't know about the "Alls I know is," but it seems to me that "a whole
> nother" might just be some sort of an infix, insofar as "linguistic phenomena"
> go. Another -> A - whole - nother. But, this is just a guess as well. I
> actually found myself using it while teaching the other day, and I started to
> think about why. The aforementioned was all I could come up with. Good luck.

As Larry Horn noted last year, it's better to think of "a whole
nother" as a case of "metanalysis" or "reanalysis" rather than
infixation, since "nother" doesn't show up in any other contexts.

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0509e&L=ads-l&P=298

See also the comments from Larry and Arnold in a whole nother thread a
few months previous to that:

http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0506b&L=ads-l&P=9840
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0506b&L=ads-l&P=7797

--Ben Zimmer

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
________________________________________________________________________
Check out the new AOL.  Most comprehensive set of free safety and security tools, free access to millions of high-quality videos from across the web, free AOL Mail and more.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org