This whole discussion is fascinating to me, too.  I'm learning a lot--thanks.

re: infixing: I guess a whole nother contemporary example would be the "iz" of hip-hop speak, like "hizouse" instead of "house."

What about sticking a complete word inside another word for emphasis, as in "abso-f*ing-lutely" or the title of the short SNL film "The Chronic-what-cles of Narnia" (http://www.youtube.com/watch.php?v=zLElfJ9YCh0)?

Beth

>>> [log in to unmask] 1/3/2006 9:27 PM >>>
Bill's right that there are some complex things happening, but infixation isn't one of them in this case.  For infixation to occur, the infix must break up a lexical root.  This is exceedingly rare in language, occurring in just a few languages in Oceania, mostly in the Philipines and Indonesia.  The closest we get to in English would be in the children's language game known as Ubby-Dubby Talk, where the syllable 'ub' is between the syllable onset consonants and the vowel, as in "bubabuby blubue ubeyes".  Of course, this is not infixation because "ub" isn't an affix; it has no meaning, and it's not a morpheme.  So "nother" can't be an infix since it doesn't interrupt a lexical root.  But that's a linguistic definition, and tied to it is the fact that, morphologically, "a(n)" isn't a lexical root; it's what's called a "clitic", a dependent form that attaches to a grammatical category, like noun phrase or verb phrase, rather than to a lexical category, like noun or verb.  The question is why the /n/ reanalyzes in just this use of other and not in any other cases.  That's one of the weird things that happens in language change, not a very satisfying explanation, but true anyway.

Dialect is made up of the whole set of traits that distinguish the speech of one region or social set from another.  "nother" is probably not one of these since it's found so widely in the US.  Rather, it is found in an informal register across English speakers of different dialects.

Herb  
 
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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