Bill,
Thanks for both of your thoughtful postings. In both cases you point to the high level of variation that is a major part of the change process. Different speakers analyze the same strings differently, and children create their own grammars as they acquire their first language. I'm rather taken by Alexander Gross's Evidence-Based Linguistics (http://languag2.home.sprynet.com/f/evidence.htm), which determinedly eschews theoretical formalism, universal claims, and much of the mythology of modern linguistics. I'm not sure just where to go with his ideas when it comes to analyzing some of the problems we've been dealing with, but it's clear that language is very much transactional, that the notion "mental grammar" is far to strong and underdetermined. Rather, variation is the nature of language, and change is a function of such variation.
So different speakers treat "another" in different ways at different times. I don't expect consistency in this. And then social influences come in and mess with you/ye/thee/thou in the odd sorts of ways you discuss.
Herbb
I'd *like* to say that I want to clarify my earlier post, but that's
typically what long-winded people (like me) say when they want another
opportunity to bloviate. Instead, I'll just say I want to argue my point
further; the results may be useful for purposes of combating insomnia,
if nothing else.
First, I want to distinguish between (1) an abstract account devised to
deal in as simple a way as possible (given some measure of simplicity)
what we think an "ideal speaker-hearer" does, and (2) the putative
reality of the matter, involving what may or may not go on in individual
speakers' heads. It's clear that from the standpoint of (1), in a
historical account, the expression "a whole nother" is a classic case of
reanalysis. Likewise, "a(n)" in many, if not most cases acts like a
clitic in the modern language. It's not clear that (2) will provide the
same account as (1). I'm always worried about (1) in any case, since
ideal speaker-hearers don't exist and I tend to be a bit literal.
Individuals can have variable and changing ideas about word structure.
Someone who does not apparently separate the 'ante-' in words like
'antebellum' and 'antedate', even at an unconscious level, may do so
after learning some Latin. Young children rather reliably go through a
stage at which they don't apparently realize that past tense suffixes
are suffixes; when they figure it out, they then start saying things
like "goed." At the relatively late age of 24, I had a morphological
nano-epiphany and realized that "rooster" had the same suffix as
"can-opener." I need to emphasize at this point that I think such
moments of analysis are more than a case of bringing to consciousness
what was already at an unconscious level; rather, they add an
*additional* representation to the existing set. New
memories/representations do not erase old ones. I'm not willing to
assume that every native speaker of English starts with an internal
representation of "another" that segments it into "a(n)+other."
If I'm right, then the status of "a whole nother" is going to vary
depending on how each individual represents "another" -- and any given
individual may represent "another" in more than one way. The expression
itself may *cause* some people to add an additional "a+nother"
representation to whatever they had to begin with. For someone who does
represent 'another' as "a(n)+other," then sticking 'whole' in between
the two phonemes in 'a(n)' is very infixy. Whether we call "a(n)" a
lexical root or not depends on how we define 'lexical'; I've seen
theories that call only content morphemes lexical -- so 'ante-' would be
lexical but past tense '-ed' would not -- and ones that (conversely)
call any morpheme lexical. I think that's simply a definitional matter
-- whether you call what's going on an infix or not, it still (under
this interpretation) involves splitting up a single morphological unit
by putting something inside it, as opposed to inserting something
between one morphological unit and another.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stahlke, Herbert F.W.
Sent: Wednesday, January 04, 2006 9:47 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: a whole nother
I had thought about the "abso-bloody-lutely" sort of example when I
wrote the bit below, and Johanna Rubba, who's having problems posting to
the list right now, also mentioned it to me. But this strikes me more
as a sort of compounding rather than a type of infixation. What gets
inserted meets several conditions: it has to be an adjective, it has to
be taboo, it gets its full stress, and it has to be inserted before a
stressed syllable, all of which is why no English speaker would create,
orally, the form Chronic-what-cles. None of these conditions hold of
affixes.
Herb
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
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select
"Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/ To
join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface
at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or
leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
---------------------------------
Yahoo! Photos
Ring in the New Year with Photo Calendars. Add photos, events,
holidays, whatever.
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web
interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"
Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/
|
