Fascinating explanation, Bill, at least to me, a mere h.s. English teacher.  
   
  Is it possible, then, that as any non-native speakers who adopt a language learn a new language, that phrasal "distortions" occur; hence, the phrase 'awhole 'nother"?  And does the number of such distortions, then, create dialect?
   
  Perhpas theoretical to some people, I know, but somewhere out there is a very wonderful Chinese-New Zealand-American by the name of Dr. Li, who once did a very fine job of teaching linguistics in southern Colo. It's his fault.

pruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
        
            I think there are some factors involved here which prevent any one treatment from being established as “real.” The difference between the “reanalysis explanation” and the “infixation explanation” depends on what you implicitly assume a speaker’s internal representation of the word is – if speakers really do segment ‘another’ in some sense as a+nother, then ‘whole’ cannot be an infix, but if they don’t segment it this way, it may be an infix. In other cases of reanalysis, the original form largely because exinct (very few people know what an apkin is), but the simultaneous existence of “another,” “a whole nother,” “an” and “other” pushes speakers in two different directions at once. There’s no reason why a given native speaker can’t represent the same word in multiple ways; there’s evidence from some cogpsi studies that indicates that people frequently do exactly that. Those originally using the expression may have simply been reanalyzing “another,” and some modern
 speakers may internally represent ‘whole’ only as an infix, but it’s potentially much messier than that. 
   
  Bill Spruiell
   
  Dept. of English
  Central Michigan University

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