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

[Benjamin Zimmer]

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

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