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

[Wilson Gray]

"A whole 'nother NP" is pretty much the standard form for Black
English and other Southern-based dialects. In California, it's almost
the only form used in black enclaves from San Diego to Sacramento.

"All's I know ..." equals "all that I know," not "all I know ..." "As"
is used as the complementizer instead of "that," i.s. "all as I know"
> "all's I know."

"All's" is common enough to be not at all unusual in the greater
Boston metropolitan area. A friend of mine originally from Burlington,
VT, also uses it.

-Wilson


On 10/5/06, Katherine Hageland <khageland at comcast.net> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Katherine Hageland <khageland at COMCAST.NET>
> Subject:      "A Whole Nother" and "Alls I Know Is"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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?
>
> Thanks!
>
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Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
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