In my reply to Allison, I ventured an interpretation of "a whole nother" that on reflection now seems was not very thorough.  I would like to ask the list about how and to what extend word formation and morphology are included in their English curricula.  I have been working on a brief introduction to the subject and find it very difficult to be brief.  I want to divide the means of word formation into at least the 9 following types:
Prefixing & Suffixing
Compounding
Conversion (one part of speech or usage to another)
Combining forms (affixes in compounds)
Back-formation
Acronyms
Blending (at both the word and phrase level)
Eponymy
Onomatopoeia

Combinations of these often appear and sometimes they are lumped together as "portmanteau" phenomena.  In the case of "a whole nother" in Allison's example, "You have a whole 'nother year to work this out," we seem to have a portmanteau blending of "You have a whole year to work this out"  and "You have another year to work this out."

These two determiners, "whole" and "another," are normally mutually exclusive, so perhaps this device is allowing the formation of a new compound determiner "a whole nother" containing the meaning of both.

[italics not intended; sorry my editor doesn't work.]

Bruce

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