Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 12:09:58 +0900 From: Daniel Long Subject: Re: whole nuther ballgame I completely agree with Larry Horn's analysis. I teach Intro to Ling with (the Japanese translation of) an English general linguistics textbook and it gives "a whole nother" as an infix example as well. I thought to myself, "hey, this guy's a famous linguist, but this ain't right." Glad to know I'm not the only one who thought this was strange. Explaining it as an infix seems to have become a part of the "folk linguistics of linguists". Danny Long Larry Horn wrote: > We did have at least one round on this a while back. My files are at work, > but I recall arguing that this is NOT a true infix (of the sort we have in > English with fan[fuckin]tastic, abso[bloody]lutely, etc.), but rather a > reanalysis of an + other --> a + nother. This kind of reanalysis is legion, > both in this direction (an ewt --> a newt) and especially in the opposite (an > orange, an umpire, an apron: all from stems with historical initial n-). > Without the reanalysis, we'd expect to get "a whole other', which in fact DOES > occur and which we wouldn't be tempted to analyze as an infix construction. > The one problem for the proposed analysis is that we might expect to get other > adverbs intervening in the 'a [ADV] nother [N]' construction besides 'other'. > Can anyone attest e.g. 'a totally/real/quite nother X'? In any case, the fact > that 'whole' appears nowhere else within a morpheme or word (unlike the > expletives 'fuckin', 'bloody', '(god)damn', etc. noted above) militates > against a true infixation analysis here. > > Larry -- Daniel Long, Associate Professor NEW tel +81-6-723-8297 Japanese Language Research Center NEW fax +81-6-723-8302 Osaka Shoin Women's College dlong[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]joho.osaka-shoin.ac.jp 4-2-26 Hishiyanishi http://www.age.ne.jp/x/oswcjlrc/ Higashi-Osaka-shi, Osaka Japan 577