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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