UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE

Portland, Maine

A WHOLE NOTHER LOOK AT NOTHER:

AN EXPLORATION OF LINGUISTICS
THROUGH EXPERIMENTATION

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the

Honors Program and Linguistics Degree
Requirements

Melissa M. St.Germain

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Standing at the end of the thesis-writing process, I can only look back and see the

many, many people who have been mentors and friends to me as I've threaded my way

through the tangled web of earning a degree. The thesis is aptly called a capstone, the

final achievement that completes and showcases the studies of five years. I therefore wish

to thank not only my committee and those who have been direct influences on my

project, but also those who have done so much to illuminate my path from matriculation

to graduation.

THANKS TO:

Peter Aicher, for your work on my committee and your humble, challenging teaching.

Nan Bragg, for your willingness to listen and your flexibility around my schedule.

Kaitlin Briggs, for…everything. For teaching me to take up more space in the world.

Jerry Conway, for asking me to find my real questions.

Wayne Cowart, for the technical, mathematical, and overall support.

Katharine Lualdi, for chairing my committee and making me answer "Why bother?"

Dana McDaniel, for tireless work on my committee and five years of stellar advising.

Judith Nagata, for helping me track down many obscure journals and dissertations.

Beth Round, for zombies, shared travel, and thoughtful ears for every woe.

Conor Quinn, for your generosity with your time and wealth of linguistic knowledge.

Judy Shepard-Kegl, for the best introduction to linguistics research I could ask for.

Jan Thompson, for your keen insights into life and your infectious calm.

Wanda Whitten, for teaching me the editor's way and for your reader's eyes.

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 DEDICATION

Every author needs an audience, for without them, the written word becomes

meaningless. I'd like to dedicate this work to the people who have been my audience and

sounding board, and who have uplifted my spirit in ways that I can't even begin to count.

I dedicate this to my parents and grandparents for their enduring financial and emotional

support, encouragement, and advice; to my sisters, who keep me laughing and don't let

my head get too big; to Sarah, my friend among friends; and last, but never least, to John,

whose love brings out so much good in me that I find it a pleasure to listen to his acute

feedback on my work. I love you all, and always will.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS
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Abstract
……………………………………………………………………………………………04
Introduction: Preliminaries & Motivations
……………………………………………………………………………………………05
Chapter 1: Linguistics 101
……………………………………………………………………………………………10
Chapter 2: The Quirks & Methods of Historical Linguistics
……………………………………………………………………………………………24
Chapter 3: The Vivisection of Modern Corpora
……………………………………………………………………………………………39
Chapter 4: Regarding Nuts & Bolts
……………………………………………………………………………………………47
Chapter 5: Data, & Conclusions
……………………………………………………………………………………………66
Post Script
……………………………………………………………………………………………78
Notes
……………………………………………………………………………………………79
Bibliography
……………………………………………………………………………………………82
Appendix A: Terms & Formatting
……………………………………………………………………………………………84
Appendix B: Corpora Results
……………………………………………………………………………………………86
Appendix C: Experiment Documentation
……………………………………………………………………………………………88
Appendix D: Data Table
……………………………………………………………………………………………94

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 ABSTRACT

We use the thinking inherent to science to make decisions in our daily lives, but for

many, the formal process of conducting (or interpreting) an experiment is daunting at

best. This work endeavors to provide one possible bridge between the scientific and laic

communities through deconstructing the research, design, execution, and interpretation of

an experiment in linguistics. The research will focus on the identity of a single English

phrase, a whole nother, with the intent of questioning how nother acts in the mental

grammar of native speakers of English.

There are two popular explanations for the behavior of the phrase a whole nother.

Some posit that nother is permitted by the occurrence of reanalysis, such that another is

coming to be understood in the mind as a nother. Infixing has also been offered as an

explanation to say that whole is being inserted between a and nother. No formal evidence

has been presented for either hypothesis to date. This work tests nother's flexibility as an

independent word form and offers evidence that reanalysis does not seem to single-

handedly account for the phrase at this point in time.

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 INTRODUCTION
PRELIMINARIES & MOTIVATIONS

A long time ago in a series of city-states scattered throughout the Mediterranean lived a

people we now call "the ancient Greeks." Far from being a coherent kingdom, or even a

homogenous people, however, they were a number of very distinct governments and

cultures that traded together and fought with one another as the times demanded. Many of

their beliefs and rituals were similar, springing from the same roots, but their various

observations of these ideals were exactly that: various.

In order to determine if their own rites and ways of living were the best, the city-

states would send out men to live in another city-state to observe the way that they lived,

worshipped, governed, and conducted their business. Athens, for example, might have

sent a young lad called Theodorus to stay at Sparta. When Theodorus had spent enough

time among the Spartans, perhaps a year, to feel that he understood their way of life, he

would return to Athens and report his findings.

He might go to the city council, so to speak, and say something like, "Those Spartans

are almost barbarous, the way that they tear young boys from their mothers' arms at such

a young age to be forged into warriors." The council would shake its collective head and

cluck its collective tongue. Theodorus would go on: "But I must say, never have I seen

such a pious place. The gods are first above men there. And what's more—I never saw a

man of Sparta who knew what it meant to abandon his shield."

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 And what good Greek could disapprove of such virtues? The Athenian council might

then consider the virtue of the Spartan warrior and look for a way to borrow from his

culture and ideas to make more courageous warriors of Athenian boys.

From this practice, we get the word theory, coming from the Greek verb theorein, "to

see." When we theorize about the world, at the heart of any new idea is an observation

and counter-observation, which is to say that we learn and create new knowledge by

looking at something unfamiliar and drawing parallels to something we thought we

understood.1

This way of thinking serves very well the famous words of the oracle at Delphi:

"Know yourself," and it stands at the heart of what modern academics have termed

"interdisciplinary thinking." As scholars who are asked to engage in this practice, we are

asked to step outside of our own discipline to look at how another area of academics

might handle the same problem, in the hope that this dialogue between disciplines will

help us see the heart of the matter more clearly.

Any thesis that is written for the Honors Program at USM is expected to meet the

criterion of interdisciplinarity. In some disciplines, this task is more easily visible than in

others. Comparing history and philosophy, for example, is a rigorous and challenging

task, but one that can very clearly produce work that holds up to criticism in both fields

and still engage in an exploration across manners of study. In the sciences, however, the

role of interdisciplinary study is, while vitally important, somewhat more difficult to see.

Science, from the Latin verb scire, meaning "to learn," has for a long time been based

in hands-on knowledge.2 We follow very specific steps that we call the "Scientific

Method" in order to demonstrate the plausibility of a hypothesis. In each field of science,

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the same method is being used with protocols that have been tailored to suit the specific

questions and materials that the field works with. To produce data that your peers will

accept as a foundation for future experience (which is as close, I think, as science comes

to recognizing anything as true or real), you must follow these protocols, or produce a

very, very good reason for redefining the protocols.

Because much of science is so thoroughly grounded in the practical experiment, it is

easy to look at a project in science and feel baffled at how one can find room in such

tightly defined methodology to re-examine the principles of your field. The experiment,

however, is really only the end result of a long exploration process that demands

interdisciplinarity. The very heart of science is the exploration of the world as a whole, of

widening our understanding of that world. Science conducted in a vacuum without any

interest in how the data interacts with what we know about the world as a whole is liable

to come up with some very implausible theories to explain the isolated results of the

experiment. No good science fails to be interdisciplinary.

If Theodorus of Athens had gone to Sparta and stayed, or if he had returned to Athens

but kept his observations to himself, he would not have been a theorist. Likewise,

interdisciplinary work done in isolation and unreported to the community is of little

value. Much of the interdisciplinary thinking found in this thesis will be presented

through the manner I have chosen to report my findings: as a reflection on the process

behind the experiment. I have endeavored to write in a way that makes the material

accessible to anyone, regardless of their background in linguistics, and this too serves the

work of interdisciplinarity. To explain your work to anyone who doesn't speak your

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language demands that you understand both the language of your teachees and the subject

you would teach them well enough to communicate the ideas clearly.

Why nother?

Sometime during my second year in the Honors program, one of my classes assigned a

section from a small, little-known book called To Know a Fly.3 It was an engaging little

story about a group of researchers who were trying to learn more about the common

house fly. The lengths that they went to discover the hunger-sensing mechanism, the

sleep patterns, the preference for certain types of sugar, and so on down the line of

minutia, are somewhat astonishing. I very clearly remember one of my classmates

remarking, with a laugh, that they didn't seem to have any real goal in doing this. They

just wanted to know more.

That's the driving force behind science in its purist form. There are, especially in a

world driven by global economics and technology, many excellent scientists who conduct

their research with the hope of finding a specific answer to a practical problem. How do

we find a more efficient fuel? What filament will work to create electric light? Is there a

way to vaccinate against or cure people of HIV? These are important problems being

approached through the scientific method, and they have a very clear, very useful

connection to our daily lives. But as these practical researchers do their work, there are

people studying the mating habits of a specific beetle in Australia with only a deep

curiosity to know more about the world to inspire their work. Perhaps they will have a

harder time finding funding than virologists, and perhaps fewer people will care about

their findings, but those who seek only to know more are not pursuing pointless pipe

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dreams. "To understand the world better" is a rational and admirable goal for anyone to

seek. What's more, the studies that may seem vaguely pointless on the surface may have

distinct relevance to hot-button issues. A study on beetles might turn out to have

something critical to say about the general state of the environment, perhaps as an

indicator of global warming.4

As I was writing this thesis, my committee chair kept pushing me to answer the

question, "Why should the reader care about this? Why does it matter?" I found the

question irritating and frustrating, because when she asked it, I felt like my work was

falling short, somehow. The question I'm going to engage in these pages is not seeking to

change a paradigm or fix a problem. I asked it simply because I was curious, and I

couldn't imagine how I could convince an uncurious reader that my work was

worthwhile.

Part of the learning process I've gone through in writing this thesis is to come to the

internal realization that curiosity is enough of a why. I asked the question that drives this

thesis with only the goal of understanding more about the world and keeping the cat

alive, and I don't need it to aim for more. Curiosity is a part of being human.

In a way, curiosity about a linguistic phenomenon is especially human. The questions

we ask of how the mind processes language are expanding our knowledge of not only the

way the world at large works, but also how we ourselves work. Just as beetles might

point to larger concerns about the environment, the careful study of this one, small phrase

may lead us to larger questions of how the mind itself works.

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 CHAPTER ONE
LINGUISTICS 101

Linguistics (lin-gwis'tiks) n. (used with a sing. verb) The study of the nature, structure,
and variation of language.5

People ask me what I do, as people will, for the sake of conversation. When I say, "I'm

studying linguistics," they inevitably reply: "Wow. So how many languages do you

speak?" When I answer "One," the following response is this: "Oh." Pause. "So what

exactly is linguistics?" While the knowledge of more than one language is useful and

eventually critical in answering the questions linguistics poses, linguistics is not about

having the ability to speak many languages. Linguistics is an interdisciplinary science

whose limits are determined only by the limitations of human communication. Anywhere

we can share a thought, coherent or otherwise, with another person—on the bus, in a

book, with our tongues and ears, or with our hands—linguistics migrates to these places

to attempt to pry apart the beautiful and complex system that governs how our thoughts

can meet outside of our minds and be understood by another.

I could spend a long time waxing poetic about the elegant mystery that is human

communication, and how enlightening the study of language is without giving a

comprehensible answer to the question: "So what do you do?" Linguistics has a broad

range of practical applications: for example, understanding how language works helps us

to assist people who have language disorders. Maybe you're slow to learn language as a

child, or seem to lag behind as you grow up in a bilingual environment. Maybe you've

suffered a stroke that's left you aphasiac, or maybe you're going deaf. Maybe you've

reached adulthood without any exposure to language. All of these situations make it

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difficult to communicate normally in life, but the work of linguistics helps us provide

more effective solutions, accommodations, or even simply informed compassion for the

problem.

We also live in a world that is increasingly automated. The trouble with automation is

that the computer systems can't communicate with humans easily, so there has to be a

very specific sort of interface. The more linguists understand about the natural language

system and the way our brain breaks it down into electronic pulses that can be carried via

neurons, the closer computer programmers can come to creating a human-computer

interface that allows us to just chat with the computer to get what we need. From the

work of linguistics, we can also make better decisions about how to educate both adults

and children in their own and foreign languages.

Linguistics also offers, on a more abstract level, the ability to see how narrow our

own perception of the world is. The vocabulary of a language is very telling about how

its speakers cut the world up into understandable pieces, and the divisions are far from

homogenous across cultures. These are just a few of the current issues that will come up

between linguists.

Like any science, linguistics is both a useful tool for accomplishing specific tasks that

impact the way we live and an excellent lens for peering into the shadows of what it

means to be human. And because it is a science that focuses very specifically on a subject

that by its nature cannot be separated from the humans who use it, linguistics is as

interdisciplinary as human interaction.

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Establishing a Question

The best way to learn just about anything is to learn by going through the process. For the

sake of demonstrating the scope of linguistics, then, I'd like to use this thesis process to

walk you through a specific study in linguistics. To understand this process, let's start

with a question that I'm personally curious about: What is happening in the brain when a

native speaker of English uses the phrase a whole nother?

Before we jump into the ways a linguist would deal with this question, we have to

start by deciding whether or not there's any need to ask it formally. Chances are you've

used the phrase or heard it dozens of times without batting an eye. Uncle Bob is telling a

story at dinner, "So I was at the store buying apples, when I ran into Jerry Smith. You

know, the guy I was in the army with in Germany? He had this crazy tattoo that I was

with him when he got, but that's a whole nother story. So I was looking at a red delicious

when Jerry walks up behind me…" And on Uncle Bob goes, this small phrase passing by

unnoticed.

Well, almost unnoticed. I noticed it, and I imagine that if you finish reading this

thesis, you'll start noticing it too. Are there any other contexts in the English language

that allow us to use the word form nother?6 Not that my research has come across. When

you find a word that can occur in one and only one setting, as a linguist, it's worth asking

why this happens.

That nother is unusual has been noticed by more people—I can't claim a gold star for

being especially attentive. If you google the phrase, you'll come up with close to a million

hits, and a fair number of these are metalanguage discussions of what the phrase might

be. There are four common camps of people who discuss the phrase: the prescriptive

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grammarians, who declare it ungrammatical; the simply curious who think it's odd, but

don't know why; the linguistically-savvy who believe it's a matter of reanalysis; and the

linguistically-savvy who think it's infixation. For the moment, don't worry about what

these terms mean—I'll come around to them soon enough. For now, all you need to know

is that within the community of people who study language, there is (a) no consensus on

what the phrase might be; (b) no formal work exploring the viable possibilities; and (c) at

least a passing interest in the answer to the question. In any area of study, these three

things all point toward a question that's worth exploring further. My initial curiosity-

sparked question looks like a good base point for looking at the field of linguistics. What

is happening in the brain when a native speaker of English uses the phrase a whole

nother?

Avoiding the Reinvention of the Wheel

The first step in doing any science is understanding what has already been said in the

field. As I mentioned before, no formal work seems to have been done on this phrase, or

at least, nothing that has been published prominently enough to show up in the scholarly

resources I have access to.7 If you can't find an answer, for all practical purposes, it isn't

there. To get a handle on how you might address a question, the best place to start is with

the ideas people are tossing around. Again, Google is an excellent way to establish a

starting point, so you know what terms to look for when you hit the journal articles and

databases. Let's look at what people are saying.

In camp number one, we find the prescriptive grammarians. These are people who

think that language can be right or wrong, and that the everyday user ought to follow

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certain rules, and avoid certain "mistakes." In formal settings, there is a small degree of

validity to such a perspective. The manner in which we communicate tells the people

around us something about who we are. If you use slangy-talk in a job interview, for

instance, you might seem either rude or uneducated, therefore hurting your chances of

getting the job.

A linguist will be quick to point out that this does not make certain "slangy" dialects

less grammatical than another. The idea that one dialect is more formal than another is

strictly a social convention, but completely arbitrary in respect to linguistic properties.

There's a story about the lisp of the Castilian dialect of Spanish. People say that King

Ferdinand spoke with a lisp, and that the citizens picked up this habit to honor the king

and keep his ego from being bruised. It's almost undoubtedly a load of hog wash, but

there's a valid point to be taken away from the idea: dialects pick up prestige because of

who speaks them. Because the dialect has that social prestige, we teach children in school

what's right and wrong in language. That doesn't make the non-standard dialect a less

useful or less correct language, it just gives us prejudices about what sounds educated.

Prescriptive ideas about language (that is, the ones that "prescribe" a certain method

of speaking or writing as correct) are bound by specific social spheres in reality. They

come from scholars loving Latin a little too much and wanting to fit English into a box.

They come from society choosing and school reinforcing what is good in speech and

writing and what is not. This perspective is neatly represented in regards to a whole

nother by the website http://www.awholenother.com/ which says simply: "It's just not

grammatically correct."8

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 Linguists, in an important contrast, study grammar from a descriptive and generative

perspective, which is to say that they are interested in describing what people actually

say, and that they see "right" and "wrong" in language in terms of whether or not the

construction in question is allowed (generated) by the mental linguistic rules of a native

speaker of the language. From a linguistic point of view, a whole nother is grammatical

in the sense that people with native competency and no language impairments use it with

apparent consistency. What we then must look into is not the rightness or the wrongness

of the phrase itself, but the why of the rightness.

Of those who accept the phrase as part of English there are two common

explanations. The prevailing view is that another has fallen subject to a classic method of

phonology-driven change in English, which is that of reanalysis. This change happens

when the final [n] of the indefinite article (a/an) in English moves between words in a

phrase. For example: the word apron came into English as naperon. Often used with the

indefinite article, a naperon eventually came to be understood as an apron.9 Words can

also change in the opposite direction, with the final [n] moving away from the article. A

classic case of this is nickname. The Old English phrase was originally an eke name,

meaning "an also name." As with naperon, the [n] jumped ship and attached itself in a

different place, this time onto the noun, producing a neke-name.10 As you can see, there's

a precedent and therefore a logical appeal towards saying that another is in the process of

being reanalyzed to become a nother. The American Heritage College Dictionary

(ACHD) supports this view in the etymology they give s.v. nother.11 It's also a popular

view in discussions that come up in the Linguist List, the top online forum for informal

discussions on language between linguists in different areas of the field.12 Reanalysis is a

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plausible explanation, and one that a few experts stand behind on at least an informal

level.

There's another linguistically-possible explanation, however, and that is a process

called infixation. In English, most people have heard the terms suffix and prefix—affixes

that attach partial words to the end or beginning of a word (respectively) to form a new

word. Infixes, as you may guess, do the same thing in the middle of a word. Some

languages use these word-bits grammatically, such that the syntax of the sentence is

determined by which affixes show up in particular places of a word. Look at this example

from Bontoc, a language spoken in the Philippines:

Nouns Verbs
Fikas "strong" Fumikas "to be strong"
Kilad "red" kumilad "to be red"
Fusul "enemy" fumusul "to be an enemy"13

Note how a noun seems to become a verb by the infixing of -um- after the first

consonant? From this little data, and knowing nothing else about the language, it would

be a mistake to claim this as an infix off-hand. It could easily be a prefix—Latin loves to

stack its verb suffixes on into infinity, but a prefix plus a prefix does not equal an infix.

An infix is defined as an affix that does its fixing in the middle of a word stem. For

example, let's look at the word read. Read is the stem, the basic unit of meaning that

carries the definition of visually comprehending text, untouched by any audible additions

that tailor it to fit various grammatical slots. To make a noun meaning "someone who

reads," we add -er, producing reader. Now we want to talk about more than one reader,

so we need to indicate the plural with an –s, creating the word readers. The -er is not an

infix just because it's caught in between the word stem and another suffix. It's still a

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suffix. For the -er to become an infix, it would have to change the word to *reaerd or

*reread. Looking at the example from Bontoc, we assume that the field linguist who

produced this data knew what was what, and that fikas and company are stem words that

change with the addition of -um- somewhere in their body.

English doesn't really do this type of affixation, and certainly doesn't use any infixes

in a grammar-determining way. We do, however, have something called expletive

infixation. In this, expletives with certain stress patterns can be stuck in the middle of

other words with particular stress patterns, with the effect of intensifying the emotion of

word. The classic pop culture example is from the movie My Fair Lady, where Eliza

Doolittle sings the unforgettable "abso-bloomin-lutely." Here, bloomin' pops up into

absolutely with no content-giving impact on the semantics. It serves only to put emphasis

on absolutely. Bloomin' is very clearly acting like an infix, however, imposing itself most

insistently into the stem absolutely. In the relatively small number of studies done on

infixing in English, the main points that have been agreed on are these: (1) it's generally

more emotive than meaningful and (2) it follows a specific pattern of prosody. The

prosody rule is basically this: an infix will be placed before the stressed syllable of the

host word and won't violate the normal stress patterns of English.14

A whole nother may be acting as an infixed expression on the same level. Another

would be the word stem, into which whole is infixed. Analyzing a whole nother as an

infixed expression does a couple of interesting things. First, it suggests that another is

mentally handled as one word rather than as two separate words that are joined only by

convention. We have the word other, something I don't think anyone would contest. It

has its uses and purposes, many of which have a similar connotative sense to another.

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What does this mean to us? If Joe Schmoe of the street reads my thesis and says, "Okay,

but who cares?" I can answer: "Semanticists!" There's a loose idea in semantics that

there's no such thing a true synonym. Even words that mean almost exactly the same

thing, such as angry and mad, have subtly nuanced differences. Has your mother ever

been chewing you out and responded to your defense with "I'm not mad. I'm angry, but

I'm not mad." The difference is minute, tiny, miniscule, but it is still there.

If another is thought of as a distinct word form in the brain, one that is separate from

an other, it should make a semanticist perk up and say, "Gee—I wonder how their

meanings vary." The shift in meaning between two words isn't instantaneous, of course.

If the idea of another as being distinct from an other is relatively recent, it could be a

long time before we notice any real semantic distinction, especially given the syntactic

and phonetic similarities between the phrases. Another is particularly odd, in truth,

because it straddles the line between function and content words. As such, it may be less

prone to changes in semantics to begin with, but there's enough possibility around the

question to make it worth asking.

The idea of a whole nother as being a result of infixing may open more discussion

about the potential for an infix to carry semantic weight. Right now, there is only

evidence for expletives or euphemisms for those expletives popping into a word in a way

that adds emotional emphasis. Consider our lady of the flowers, Eliza Doolittle. When

she sings "I'll sit abso-bloomin-lutely still," she is not suggesting that the absoluteness of

her sitting will have anything at all to do with the act of blooming. In a more graphic

American example (my apologies if this offends—it's one of the few that American

English uses) is the shocker that the late and well-loved linguist Jim McCawley was so

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fond of: Ala-fuckin-bama.15 If Joe Schmoe tells me he's going to Ala-fuckin-bama, he is

not necessarily saying that there's anything about Alabama or his going there that is

specifically connected to rough sexual intercourse. He might be, but this meaning is not

typically allowed for such constructions. More to the point, the infix is not working in the

way modifiers normally do. Rather than describing the word Alabama or something in

the sense of the sentence, the infix conveys information about the speaker's attitude.

In the case of a whole nother, however, whole adds a bit more than emphasis. It

means "completely, entirely, and thoroughly." Imagine, if you would, that I'm grabbing

the groceries out of my trunk, and there's a little that I couldn't quite carry. I might come

in and say to my roommate, "There's another bag of groceries in the car." If, however,

we're just moving in, we've been working for six hours schlepping my book collection,

and we're beat, I might say "There's a whole nother load of books in the car." There is a

distinct, quantitative different between the meanings of those phrases another and a

whole nother, and the difference comes from a quantitative modifier infixed into the

word. There are no good examples of meaningful infixing in English, or at least none that

I came across in my research.16 This possibility of infixing as an explanation for why we

say a whole nother does come up in some online forums, though frequently with a

refutation that reanalysis is the likelier explanation, given the limited evidence for

infixing in English.17

Semantics is only one branch of linguistics that might have an interest in the results of

this study. The properties of a whole nother may point to changes in the word over time,

which is relevant to historical linguists. The sound qualities and indefinite word

boundaries may pique the curiosity of those who study both the mental and physical

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production of speech sounds. A small study of one phrase has the potential to cross

several disciplines in linguistics, which we'll discuss as we go.

As I've said, linguists simply do not agree on one explanation for the presence of a

whole nother. There's something simple and profound in that, as there is in all the

motivation we find to study the workings of the brain—we don't know our own minds. If

nothing else, there's reason to believe that the field may have use for more evidence of

meaningful infixes in English, which is reason enough to explore the possibility that a

whole nother is an example of English infixing. Now that we've at least established what

the two prevailing and linguistically-informed sides of the debate are, we can begin to

think about establishing a method for proposing an answer. The easiest starting point is,

perhaps, with a hypothesis.

Infixation is not favored over reanalysis as an explanation of why we can say a whole

nother, but I believe it is the more accurate explanation, for reasons that I'll explain as we

go. The hypothesis we will use to examine the nature of linguistics, then, is this: "A whole

nother does not result from an other having been reanalyzed to a nother may be an

example of a non-expletive and semantically-richer case of infixing in English." We

predict that this will be demonstrated by a failure of nother to appear in contexts outside

of a whole nother. The logic for this is that is nother is an independent word, it should

appear in a wide variety of contexts, as one would expect any word to do. If a whole

nother is another with the infix whole, then nother is just a part of the word a-whole-

nother and should not appear in any other contexts.

- 20 -
Planning the Inquiry

The first thing we need to do to understand this phenomenon is to explore the history of

the word (Chapter 2). We'll do this to try to figure out how the use and understanding of

another has evolved through the years. Given the limited time and resources available for

an undergraduate thesis, the best tool for this is the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

The OED offers examples of how each word in an entry has actually been used, and

when. Though there are limitations to what we can learn from the written record, this sort

of comparison will give us the most accurate idea of the limitations and possibilities of

how other, nother, and another might be used in English, historically speaking. To

understand both the problems and value of such a tool, we will also take a brief look at

the history of English as a written language and the development of lexicography.

Without this knowledge, we can learn very little of use from a dictionary entry. Our first

pursuit, then, is history—of the language, the people who use it, and the ways they

describe it.

Once we have a sense of our phrase in a historical context, we need to look at it from

a more social perspective (Chapter 3). How do people use it, who uses it, and where?

Because it's still difficult to search the audio records we have of speech, we are again

limited to a written body of work. Fortunately, the Internet provides us with almost

immediate access to a plethora of texts in their natural context. We can also search for

uses of nother that might point to the existence of nother as an independent word form,

supporting the idea of reanalysis. This method won't prove that nother doesn't exist, even

if we turn up nothing, but it can give us a sense of how people do and don't tend to use

the word. This method allows us to create a portrait of a whole nother in terms of current,

- 21 -
day-to-day utterances. We may see a pattern of when people find it more acceptable to

use the phrase, and when it just doesn't seem to appear. This step will establish a useful

backdrop for the experimental design of the third important step in testing this

hypothesis.

The third and more or less final stage of our inquiry will test the psychological side of

our phrase (Chapter 4). Previous research suggests strongly that, when it comes to

language, people make rotten parrots. We tend to listen not for the form of an utterance,

but rather for the content. This filter allows us to understand what people say to us, even

when they make errors in speech. When asked to reproduce what we heard, we start with

meaning, and produce the form correctly most of the time. For instance, if I said: "What

time it is?" and asked you to repeat me, it's quite likely that you would say: "What time is

it?" We can use this tendency to ferret out indirectly what the mind processes as

grammatical or not. If I give you a sentence that has nother in a place your brain thinks

nother can't be, I'll learn something about the identity of the word form by the manner in

which you correct it. We'll use the information from the corpora study about where

people do use other and nother to help us design our test based on how people use other

and nother. The last segment, as with any research, will examine the results and the

implications of the work we have done (Chapter 5).

The most fascinating thing about linguistics is that there is such a depth of mystery

around the mundane ways of speaking we use, around habits that emanate from our own

minds. This uncertainty of what a whole nother is demonstrates what linguistics

constantly pulls into the light—how little we know our own minds. So much of our

knowledge of language is subconscious. When we order a meal, buy a movie ticket,

- 22 -
confess our love, answer a question, or perform any of the quotidian and profound acts

with speech that we do, we are using a neurological, psychological, and social muscle

that even the experts don't fully understand. At the deepest heart of linguistics is the need

to pursue the ancient wisdom of Delphi: Know thyself.

- 23 -
 CHAPTER TWO
THE QUIRKS & METHODS OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Before we can develop an experiment to test the plausibility of nother's existence as an

independent word form, we need to look carefully at the work that's been done regarding

both the two relevant hypotheses: reanalysis and infixing. This process, referred to as a

literature review, is important in any research field. Whether you're decoding hieroglyphs

with the Rosetta Stone or looking for a unified field theory, it's important to know what's

already been discovered so that you can build upon existing work rather than reinventing

the wheel.18 By looking at this knowledge here, we establish a solid foundation for

discussing the hypothesis we'll be exploring. More importantly, we'll give due credit to

those who have done the fundamental work.

In Chapter 1, we discussed the idea of reanalysis briefly. The literature on reanalysis

suggests that nother is either a word or on its way to becoming one. Let's go back to that

concept in more depth now and explore both the work that supports this theory and the

plausibility of the explanation.

Reanalysis, if you recall, is a type of language change in which sounds or larger units

move from the end of one word in a phrase to the beginning of another, or vice versa. In

English, the article an is a common culprit. The phonology of English dictates that

whenever the indefinite article is used in front of a word beginning in a vowel sound, it

should sound as an instead of a. For example, you won't typically hear a native, adult

speaker of English say a apple. They'll tend to use an apple instead. 19

- 24 -
 Some speakers do use an in front of /h/ and /y/ sounds, which are considered semi-

vocalic (read: quasi-vowels). You may have heard a professor or a British person say

something like "an heritage" or "an eulogy." This optional condition for the use of an is

of only minor relevance to our exploration, but it's worth going into a little detail about

the discussion, as the methodology behind the argument speaks strongly to the

methodology I will be relying on.

In a 1979 issue of American Speech, linguist J. K. Bollard wrote: "Any student of

English should be aware of the many differences between the spoken and the written

language... [T]hese differences may be [subtly] balanced and distributed, often without

the user being aware of a difference at all."20 He goes on to discuss how the Webster

Dictionary's editors note the appearance of a or an before a word beginning with a

pronounced /h/.21 The most important point of his paper, for our purposes, is this

comment: "We might do well to keep in mind the caveat that an editor may be more

likely to take down citations for items which differ from that editor's own personal

usage."22 Out of these two quotes, we need to take two very, very, very important lessons

about the methodology of any linguistics, but especially historical linguistics (because of

the necessity of using only written records).

First, there is a disconnect between writing and speech. Speech is more subject to

change, not in small part because every time we use it, we are producing a set of sounds

as if for the first time. That is to say, there is plenty of room for stumbling and twisted

tongues. If you converse with someone, you might notice the occasional stutter or

reversing of sounds—we take some of these extreme examples to be humorous, in a way,

when two people commonly recognize a sound utterance that makes no sense. At the

- 25 -
same time, however, we should bear in mind that we are not actually actively alert to all

the subtleties of sound that pop out of our mouths. If you ever listen closely to a

recording of a conversation you had, not knowing it was being recorded, you might be

surprised at how many little errors you make that are simply passed over as

comprehensible by both the speaker and listener. Our minds have an astonishing capacity

to "get the point," regardless of what noises actually passed between two people.

Writing, on the other hand, is a creative process subject to revision. Culturally

speaking, I have no doubt that in this day of word-processing programs that correct half

of our spelling for us, we spend much more time on editing than did the ancient Romans

or the scribes of King Alfred. Even so, writing demands more precision than speech.

Take, for example, a lecture given by a certain professor that needs to be transcribed and

turned into a paper. Let's say that everyone in the audience grasped what he was saying

very clearly as he spoke, as did the person who transcribed the paper. I can almost

guarantee you that if you take that transcription of an excellent lecture and hand it exactly

as it was delivered to the editors of a journal, they would turn it down flat. And why?

Because we process speech differently than we process writing, and it takes a lot more

work to make sense out of the written mistakes that pass us by without notice in

conversation.

Speech is a passing thing that comes in and out of our ears. It doesn't stay with us, so

we don't have time to scrutinize it for small errors. We extract the meaning and move on.

If a person can't create a cohesive meaning out of the normal pieces of language without

getting distracted by the minor errors, they probably have a language disorder. Unlike

speech, however, a written page in front of us sticks around for much longer—we can go

- 26 -
back and look for the errors, even if they don't stop us from grasping the point. The

relevance of this distinction for the work we have embarked upon is that we are

beginning our journey with written resources. As we study the dictionary history of

nother and other closely-related word forms, we should bear in mind that written and

spoken language are intricately bound to one another, but are nevertheless distinct.

The second point Bollard makes is about this same filter that allows us to edit out the

mistakes other people hear in language. As with the error filter, the idea is that what we

hear and what we are overtly aware of in language are two different things. There's no

better term to sum up this phenomenon than perception. The term is in no way specific

to linguistics. Our minds generally want to break the world up into pieces and reconstruct

it in a way we can grok as efficiently as possible. Consider this passage from game

design theorist Ralph Koster: "We've learned that if you show someone a movie with a

lot of jugglers in it and tell them in advance to count the jugglers, they will probably miss

the large pink gorilla in the background, even though it's a somewhat noticeable object.

The brain is good at cutting out the irrelevant."23 And our brain happens to think that a

great deal of the world around us is irrelevant.

Imagine that you're the editor of a dictionary. Your job is to count how many times

the people around you use the two pronunciations of the definite article: the (rhymed with

tree) versus the (rhymed with huh). Not to be the bearer of bad news, Ms. Editor, but

aside from having a Sisyphusian task on your hands to begin with, you'll be fighting

against your own mind. If you find one of those pronunciations slightly odd in your

particular dialect, your count will almost inevitably end up suggesting that the people in

your life are more likely to use the form you find less familiar: we are much more likely

- 27 -
to latch onto something strange, and the familiar is too functional to catch consistent

notice of. How many silver cars do you see on the road? Hundreds, right? If someone

handed you a clipboard and a pencil, stood you at the top of an on-ramp to the freeway

near Boston, and told you to count all the silver cars that passed you, you'd miss many of

them, partially because they're so common, and partially because they're moving so fast.

If you were asked to count all the bright pink cars, you'd have a better chance of being

accurate, simply because there would be less to miss. The point of this is that there will

always be human error in the making of dictionaries and word studies because it is

impossible to remove editors' biases in a language they use. Technology does allow us to

begin to minimize these biases, and certainly the methodology has improved since

Bollard was writing in 1979, but we should not forget that these biases are strongly

ingrained in our everyday lives in order to allow us to communicate and by extension, are

always there.

Compared to consonants, vowels are fairly imprecise sounds. Bear with me for a

moment: we're going down the path of phonetics, the science of how speech sounds are

produced. Speech sounds (the individual bits of sound that make up a word—in English

writing you can mostly associate them with specific letters) are produced by air flowing

from the lungs, through the vocal chords, mouth, nasal cavities and mouth. They change

according to how the tongue is moving to either change the shape of the space the air is

resonating in (which produces different vowels) or by changing the place where the air

from the lungs is either stopped partially or completely (producing different consonants

and sonorants).24

- 28 -
 The most important part of this discussion, for our purposes, is the impact of vowels

and a particular type of sonorant (vowel-like sound) called nasals. Nasals, such as /m/ and

/n/, are called this because they pass the air through the nasal cavity rather than the

mouth. The sound created is a result more of the resonance of the air, like vowels, than

the obstruction of air, like consonants. When you put nasals and vowels next to each

other the effects are often distinctly noticeable. Try saying "cat" aloud. Do you hear how

the vowel sounds? Say it a few times to put it in your ear. I'll wait….Good. Now say

"can," as in a "can of soup." Do you hear how different the vowel sounds in those two

words? As far as vowel quality is concerned, they're exactly the same except for one

small thing: the proximity of the /n/. The vowel anticipates the coming nasal and picks up

some of its nose-focused characteristics.

It's worth pointing out that all sounds have some influence on the sounds around

them. Our tongue travels very long distances in a very short period of time to produce the

sounds we interpret as language, and it's inevitable that we'll produce continuous sound

rather than a series of distinct sounds with spaces in between. When I say that vowels and

nasals are inclined to influence each other strongly, I'm not saying that nasals and vowels

don't have a similar interaction with consonants. When sounds are pronounced next to

one another they slightly (sometimes drastically) change both the way we articulate and

perceive them. This is called coarticulation, and evidence for its ubiquitous nature are

abundant in the world's languages. For the moment, however, we are only looking at the

relationship between nasals and vowels because it is that relationship that matters for the

type of reanalysis we're explaining.

- 29 -
Getting to Know Reanalysis

Before we go into the examples and critical discussion of reanalysis, let's play another

little game to get an intuitive feel for how this specific change happens. Say the phrase

"an apple-green apron." Excellent. Now say it ten times fast. I'm not kidding—say it over

and over quickly, slowly—as many times as it takes for you to start feeling like the

familiar words are a little strange. Go ahead. I'll still be here when you're ready.

Ready? Is it an apple, or a napple? Is it a green apron, or a green napron? Now,

because you're a native speaker of English, you know without doubt that an apple is an

"apple" and an apron is an "apron." You also have the benefit of living in a world where

spelling is fairly consistent, which reinforces the word boundaries that already exist in

your mind. But can you feel how easy it would be to start calling apples "napples"? If you

were a child learning your language, not yet able to read, and had only heard apple with

the indefinite article attached, could you imagine thinking that perhaps it's perfectly okay

to say "I want a red napple"?

The actual motivation for the progression of the change is, of course, not so clear cut.

Such changes in language happen over a long span of time and are influenced by many

subtle factors that in most cases we can really only guess at. Historical linguistics—the

branch of linguistics that studies the changes in language over time—is largely informed

guesswork. Since language does change over time, we can't interview living speakers of

the older dialects of English. We therefore draw inferences about what has happened by

observing patterns in whatever written records we have available. At a basic level, this

means reading material from different periods of a language to look for specific forms of

- 30 -
a word—when they appear, when they change, etc. We can often see quite easily what

did happen—the why and wherefore is more elusive.

Right now, the facts of the event are sufficient for our purposes. The precise causality

behind the words that undergo reanalysis is less important for understanding the process

than examining the evidence of what happened. Take a quick stroll over to the library

with me and pull out the first volume of the OED. Thumb through to the entry for apron.

The entry is sheer poetry for a historical linguist. From 1307, we have several examples

of the word being naperonn or napron. The spelling is vague, but the identity is not—

there is most distinctly an independent /n/ at the beginning of the word. We see it

preceded by ad in 1307, by hir in 1400. Neither word ends in an /n/, and neither has a

form that should end in an /n/. The nasal belongs to napron alone. Around 1460, we have

evidence of a change in progress. From 1461 through 1569, we have examples for

aprons, naprons, and apurns. The latest example we have of the initial /n/ is in 1569,

where, in fact, the word is preceded by the indefinite article, giving us a napron and with

it the ambiguity about where that /n/ really belongs. By 1822, we have 253 years without

the appearance of the initial /n/, supported by n-less words before it: leather apron, blue

aprons.25

The importance of seeing the word without the indefinite article or a word ending in

/n/ before apron and napron alike is that we know, when spelling is ambiguous, how easy

it is for the orthography to trick us into thinking an /n/ is where it isn't as far as the

language-producing mind is concerned. When we have the /n/ without any other

influence, it allows us to confidently say that the word is napron. When we have the later

form without any other /n/ to hide behind, we know the word is apron.26

- 31 -
Dictionaries and the Difficulty of the Written Word

The dictionary I used to show you how we look at the change of words over time is the

OED, a veritable behemoth of a reference book that comes in no less than twenty very

large volumes. As I explained above, there's a lot of value that can be gained from a

dictionary, but there are certain limitations of a dictionary-based word study that we need

to consider. For one thing, writing conventions, especially when one is trying to consider

specific details of phonology, will cheat you like Guinevere cheated Arthur. George

Bernard Shaw famously pointed out that it's possible to spell the word fish as "ghoti." Gh

as in rough, o as in women and ti as in nation.27 Can you imagine trying to sort out the

spelling of modern English two hundred years from now if there were no surviving audio

record and little remaining texts on how things ought to be read? That's a task I would

dread, understanding the byzantine complexity of English orthography. And yet it's this

same difficulty that we face in using the kind of texts that the OED is based on.28

The OED and other descriptive dictionaries (the most common type of contemporary

desk dictionaries) strive to capture the way language is being used at the time of their

compilation. The OED stands out as a useful tool among the others because it goes as far

back into the English language as we have a written record and looks at each appearance

of each word, noting the first appearance, changes in spelling, differences in usage, and

where these were used in the literary record. The difference between this and, say, the

AHCD is important. The AHCD is trying to give native speakers of English insights into

parts of their own, contemporary language that they are less familiar with.

Think of it like this: you just got a new haircut, and you can't see the back of your

head to decide if you like it or not. Your friend snaps a Polaroid and hands it to you: now

- 32 -
you can see yourself better. That's what usage dictionaries like Webster's and the AHCD

try to do. The OED is essentially a vast filing cabinet of Polaroids taken at different

points in time. Now, instead of just seeing yourself as you look at that one moment, you

can compare these pictures to see how the back of your head has changed with each

haircut over your entire life. While such knowledge about a haircut might help you

decide that the eighties doesn't bear repeating, that sort of comparison helps linguists see

both how individual words change (just like your file of pictures) and how patterns of

change show up across different words (e.g., your friends all survived the eighties too).

This is a strength that the OED possesses in terms of understanding a language,

something that cannot be gained by simply testing and interviewing living speakers. The

written word, and the study thereof, allows us to hold time still, in a way. Language is

fluid and ever-changing: written language is a time traveler that permits us to glance into

the past. So, in spite of the limits of the information they can convey, we put dictionaries

to good use.

Reanalysis and Nother

So now we've got something of a handle on reanalysis as a concept. Let's bring our

knowledge back to the issue under investigation. What does reanalysis have to do with

our phrase a whole nother? In the AHCD, nother is given its own entry, which looks like

this:

Noth•er (nŭth´ər) adj. Informal Other. Usu. used in the phrase a whole nother, as in
That's a whole nother story. [<alternation of ANOTHER (interpreted as a nother).] 29

We'll spend a fair amount of time considering this entry as our inquiry progresses, but for

the moment I'd like you to look carefully at the part of the entry in square brackets. These

- 33 -
brackets indicate that a claim is being made about the etymology of the word, that is to

say, where it comes from historically. The open-angle bracket indicates a direction of

change, though that detail is of little significance for our purposes. The claim that the

AHCD is making by the phrasing of its etymology is precisely that nother, though only

informal in usage, has been derived by a reanalysis of the word another.

This observation may seem a simple one, but consider this: dictionaries are compiled

by professionals who study language and the way it's used and has been used. As little as

we may find in the way of full-blown research around the phrase a whole nother, this

single dictionary entry constitutes a claim by someone in the field that nother is an

independent word form derived by reanalysis. There may be little time and interest

invested in the claim, but the claim is still there to be affirmed or challenged.

The only other formal claim about the nature of nother I've found is in a paper by an

English student at Calvin College. His paper was useful to me in looking for more

research in the field (conclusion: none exists) and also in considering the possible

explanations of how a whole nother works.30 His ultimate description of the phrase is

inconclusive, suggesting only that several things may come into play in the identity of a

whole nother. Here's what he has to say about reanalysis in particular:

A similar change [such as noumpere > umpire] from an other to a nother could
logically occur in spoken English, because the rules of the language would not restrict it.
In fact, nother was at one time part of the standard form of English, but is now obsolete.
However, it inevitably takes longer for standard written English to follow: the forms of
an umpire and a noumpere were both acceptable for nearly a century before an umpire
became standard. Thus, nother, as it exists in a whole nother – is not part of standard
written English.31

The critical point of his analysis of reanalysis is that language change is slow and

hard to see when you're in the middle of it. I might be able to strongly suggest that nother

is not currently used as an independent word form, but I cannot confidently predict that it

- 34 -
will never become one. The very process which I am suggesting is happening—that of

infixing—is a very plausible catalyst for reanalysis. The conclusions I reach today could

very well be completely different if the research was conducted in the same manner fifty

years hence. This possibility points us again to the malleable and fluid mystery that our

daily conversations are composed of.

Nother and the OED

If I've done my job well, by now you should have a pretty good handle on the type of

change that has happened in English that would make it seem pretty plausible that

reanalysis could be happening to break another into a nother. Now let's take a quick

moment to look at how nother has appeared to the compilers of the OED.

There are five separate entries for the phonological form nother in the OED. We will

mostly only worry about two of them—the two that have the same semantic sense as

"other." Though the other possible senses may have influenced the use of nother to mean

"other," we will only spend a short time considering that possibility further down in the

word study.

The first entry for nother gives the meaning as a "var. of OTHER, with n transferred

from the article." Here, nother appears in four different forms. The most extensive

evidence is for usage with the indefinite article. Each of the examples appears very

strictly with the article, and without division. The usage listed is seen as early as 1300

and as late as 1782. We might argue that this was evidence of nother as a word in the

past, but for two little details: the contemporaneous use of an other and another. The first

of these is seen in documents as early as 1340. The latter is in evidence from at least

1377. Both, you see, are showing up very closely with uses of nother. Because these

- 35 -
phrases were being consistently used during the same period in the history of English, we

have to chalk the variations up to differences in dialects and a lack of coherency in

spelling prior to at least 1782.

The fourth and final form under this definition is the most intriguing—the notheren,

meaning "the nothers." Separated from the indefinite article, there is no /n/ to influence

the use toward nother, but the form did exist. Unfortunately, the OED gives only two

examples of this form, and both from the same author, who was writing in 1315—more

than seven hundred years ago. Nother may have been an independent word form at one

point in time, regardless of the inconsistent spelling conventions, but we don't have much

in the way of strong evidence for this.32

The second entry for nother that has the same meaning as ours is listed as 'nother. If I

haven't communicated this thoroughly yet, let me put emphasis on it now: people who

work with words can make very specific claims about their work with a very small

punctuation mark—punctuation and formatting are part of the jargon of the field. When

the OED lists nother under 'nother, they're positing a contraction, which is altogether

different than reanalysis. They define the word as a "colloq. var. [of] ANOTHER." The

examples are much more recent than those found in the first entry, ranging from 1934 –

1973. The importance of the abbreviation "colloq." is that, standing for "colloquial," it

refers to an informal and stylized manner of speech. Each example is obviously from a

writer trying to convey a distinct sound of informal English. For example, in 1972, we

see "'Nother little bit of the thing just occurred to me." It's possible that these examples

point to the existence of nother, but it's more likely that the apostrophe is shorthand for a

very, very short vowel where you'd expect to find /a/. The writers were writing not

- 36 -
necessarily in their own dialects, and most certainly not with any phonetic accuracy, so at

best we can take these examples as possibilities to keep our eyes open for.33

As for the other definitions of nother listed in the OED, we see the form appearing as

"neither," "neither of two," and "nowhere." Because their meaning is not the same, we

can't say, "Look! Nother used to be a real, bonified, genuine word!" Well, yes,

technically there was a word that used that form in a way that doesn't suggest a confused

reanalysis, but linguistics does not treat homophones (words that sound the same) or

homographs (words that are spelled the same) as being the same word. Words with the

same form or sound but different meanings act very differently in the context of syntax

and semantics, so we treat them as separate words. As this is a linguistic inquiry, we must

use a linguistic understanding of what a word is on a functional level to determine

whether nother is or is not a word.34

These other definitions of nother are not, however, entirely irrelevant. When my

sisters and I were younger, we used to tease my mother by singing along with her Kenny

Rogers music at the top of our lungs when she would play her tapes in the car. Do you

remember "Lucille"? "Four hundred children and a crop in the field!" We would sing that

line with such conviction, until one day Mom realized what we were singing. "Not

hundred," she corrected us. "Hungry. Four hungry children." I had thought it odd that

anyone would have four hundred children, but this was country music, which never made

much sense to me anyway. We couldn't quite make out what the singer was saying, so we

filled in the gaps with our own imaginations.

Remember how much our brain hides from us? Something similar happens in

language change. When you don't know a word or mishear a word but can make enough

- 37 -
of a quick internal rationalization to understand it as another similar word, you will. The

existence of nother, albeit with other meanings, could conceivably lend a hand towards

the eventual emergence of nother as a truly independent word form that means "other."

So far, however, the evidence seems to be saying that English has resisted committing to

the change.

The long and short of it is that nother was an acceptable written form in the past, but

the only good examples we have of this form appearing are in constructions that were

appearing contemporaneously with alternate phrases, the only difference being the

interpretation of where the final /n/ fell. When we see a nother, we also see another and

an other. Similarly, we see no nother, but it was apparently also fine to say none other at

the same time. The OED may have caught these phrases in flux in such a way that we

can't see which direction they're changing from and to, but it's more likely that these

phrases will always be prone to reinterpretation in linguistics because of the phonological

relationship between the indefinite article and words that begin with a vowel.

Here we run into the limitations of a dictionary: it has told us a great deal about the

inconsistent nature of our target hypothetical word form in the past, but not in any way

that would allow us to predict how the phrase ought to work now. The age-old adage that

history repeats itself does bear consideration: what was fluid in the past may be so even

now.

- 38 -
 CHAPTER THREE
THE VIVISECTION OF MODERN CORPORA

Remember, if you will, that infixing is what we call the process where we stick one word

inside another. Our hypothesis predicts that this process is more likely to be responsible

for our ability to use the phrase a whole nother than reanalysis. But why do we think this?

Where's the logic in suggesting this process over another, when both are happening in

between our neurons?

It's elementary, my dear Watson, but we need to do a bit of gumshoeing about to find

the proof in the pudding. Or rather, the clue in the pudding. Science is wary of the word

"proof" for good reasons. Even the best theories in science are not "proven." They are

very, very, very strongly supported by their consistent ability to make correct predictions,

but the only good theory is one that might some day be knocked over (or constructively

revised) by a better explanation. The only proof in science is disproof. But I digress.

Remember our point in looking at the history of nother in the OED? We were looking

for a use of nother that did not include the indirect article or another word ending in /n/

directly before it, from which it could have picked up its extra nasal buddy. The idea was

that evidence of nother used without a preceding /n/ word would have suggested that

nother had enough of a backbone to be its own word. We didn't find anything suggesting

that. All examples of nother save one—the notheren, which gave little evidence to back-

up its claim to wordhood—could be explained by the word before. But that was then.

What about now?

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 Studying the way we use language now is a different process that requires different

methodology. You wouldn't expect a historian and an anthropologist to use the exact

same tactics in describing a culture, right? One would hope not, at least, as one deals with

living people, the other with the past. Their methodologies will certainly inform one

another and overlap, but you can't converse with an urn in quite the same way you can

with a living person. Ideally, as linguists looking at modern language, we would be

walking around with a tape recorder, recording everything we hear around us, and then

searching that recording for samples that are relevant to our topic of inquiry.

Unfortunately, technology isn't quite up to making that task practical for what we need.

Instead, then, we must turn to a corpora.

A corpora is a large sample of language as it was used by people in real

circumstances, as opposed to responses to linguistic tests. There are some, like CHILDES

(the Child Language Database), that hold many, many transcripts of recorded

conversations from past research projects.35 Using these is the next best step after

recording random, unbiased snippets of conversation from wherever life takes us.

CHILDES in particular is a free resource, but if you're going to use it, you've got to

commit to it to produce reliable results. The only way to search it is through the program

its keepers provide, and that's no walk in the park. One could probably earn an honorary

degree in computer science for figuring out how to use that behemoth. If you specifically

need the data they're offering, do it. Any effort to do things right is worth it. If a shortcut

will give you what you need, use the shortcut. Elsewhere madness lies.

How do we decide what we do or don't need? Think about our goal. Our goal is to get

a general sense of how nother is working in English so that we can design an experiment

- 40 -
that makes sense to test nother's identity. We need a sample of English used more or less

naturally; we don't necessarily need the data in the cumbersome CHILDES database.

CHILDES mostly records transcripts of children interacting with their parents, playmates,

or researchers. If you have a child-language specific project, the chances are good that

you need CHILDES. Children don't write in an easily searchable format like adults do,

and getting permission to run experiments where you're recording children can be very

difficult, especially as an undergrad, first-time researcher. Our hypothesis is not making

any claims about how children (as opposed to adults) will deal with nother, so we can

build our own corpora. From where? That lovely land of informal writing we call the

Internet.

Writing and speech are not equivalent to one another in terms of their accuracy in

describing linguistic processes. Writing is often more formal, more inclined to follow

prescriptive rules, and sticks around long enough for people to pick up on errors. We

cannot, therefore, simply look at the writing we find online and make any defensible

claim about how native speakers of English are processing language. Remember, though,

that for the moment, a general sense of the idea will suffice.

Before we proceed, there's an incredibly important concept we need to cover. Bad

writing and bad speech are not the same thing. If it's difficult to grasp the difference,

think of how they're taught. Language, our oral/aural or visual (i.e., signed) means of

communication, is something we start to learn from an incredibly young age, through

processes that are only recently becoming less mystifying to linguistics. If you ask a

young mother how her toddler is learning to speak, she can recount the different stages

that she notices, but she would be unlikely to give an accurate scientific account of the

- 41 -
why. We learn to speak as we learn to walk: both are strongly influenced by the

environment in which we learn, but in ways that aren't easy to isolate. They're also both

in the category of things that can't be legitimately critiqued. No two kids are exactly

identical in their physiology and background, but unless a child has some specific

problem like Spina Bifida, their walk is going to be about equal to any other kid's. Not

identical, but equal. Language is the same way. How children speak is going to be

impacted by their environment, but barring a language disorder, their language skills will

all be fairly equal. Different, but equal. We have established social prejudices about what

"learned" speech sounds like, but those prejudices are just that: prejudice. They don't

have anything to do with linguistic grammaticality.

Writing, on the other hand, is a concrete skill. We don't just pick it up—it has to be

taught over many years. As a specifically taught skill, good writing is something like

good manners. We wouldn't write "I ain't got no idea" in an admissions essay to Harvard

any more than we would drop the f-word repeatedly at dinner with our Catholic

grandmothers. "Good" writing (in reference to style, not artistry) is about interacting with

the world on a more formal level, and it's much more about manners and demonstrating

that we fit into the professional world than it is about grammaticality.

The nice thing about the Internet, as opposed to newspapers and books, is that it

contains a flood of "bad" writing, writing that is done by people who speak perfect

English and couldn't care less for punctuation, spelling, and style.36 This means that we

can mine their written words for samples that will be at least marginally closer to spoken

language. Social norms being what they are, we can find different levels of writing on the

Internet. There's the news feed, probably being produced by an English major who cares

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about the formalities of writing. There's the blog, possibly an outlet for the same English

major, but also possibly a journal for someone who is using a blog as an online presence

without caring much about the style of their writing. And then, of course, we have the

listservs and the chatrooms, bless them, where participants are conversing through

written, public forums.

We want a fairly random sampling of topics, to hopefully diversify the group of

people we're hearing from, so let's search for chatrooms and listservs on politics, music,

religion, literature, television, and technology. We can copy and paste the text into a

Word document, then search the document using the "Find" tool (CTRL + F). Let's take

about 10,000 words total from these locations combined. That's an arbitrary number, but

it should give us a reasonable sample size to extrapolate some ideas from. Chatrooms and

listservs are only one way of communicating on the Internet, so just to be fair, let's make

another document, searching for the same topics in blogs and newsfeeds. Let's take the

same number of words, just to be consistent. Now we've got 20,000 easily searchable

words to look at to feel out how nother and its counterparts are working.

Since the closest words to nother we have as a basis for comparison are another and

other, why don't we run a search for all three words, just so we can see what kind of

frequency they pop up with, and in what sort of contexts. Every time we find something,

we'll copy it down (Appendix B). There's no point in going through all of the results that

came up. They're all pretty standard uses of common words. What did come out of this

search, what we did all that work for, is this: nother does not appear in the 20,000 words

outside of the context of a whole nother. In fact, the phrase itself only appears twice in

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that bulk of text, so we can't really make any grandiose claims about it from our corpora

anyway.

When we set out to develop and use the corpora, there was hope that it would tell us

something about who uses a whole nother. It would have been lovely to see clear

evidence one way or another that the phrase does or does not have a specific place in the

social sphere. But here is an important lesson of science: we don't always get what we

want, and the resources to pursue what we want are not always there. That being said,

even sparse data has a story to tell. Thomas Edison, so the story goes, had just tested

three hundred different possible ways of configuring a filament for his light bulb

prototype. When the next filament failed with a flash, crackle, and pop, Edison's assistant

threw up his hands in despair. "Three hundred and one trials, and we're no closer to

finding something that will work!" Edison laughed and corrected his young helper. "On

the contrary, my friend," he said. "We now know three hundred and one configurations

that will not work." If we don't get the results we were looking for, we must consider

what their absence can tell us.

Now is a good time to review our hypothesis: nother can exist in the phrase a whole

nother not because it has been reanalyzed as an independent word form, but because of

infixing. Part of the potential value of the corpora is to give us a cheaper, less time-

consuming way to determine if there is a need for our experiment. What we need to ask is

what we should find in the corpora if our hypothesis is incorrect. The antithesis to our

proposition is that nother is a word in its own right: this is called the null hypothesis. If

the corpora provides clear evidence for the null hypothesis, we would probably want to

rethink our prediction. Think back to our dictionary study. We were looking for examples

- 44 -
of our various victims of reanalysis that showed the word without the indefinite article, or

another word that would permit the ambiguity of where the /n/ belonged (blue apron, for

example, is more useful than green apron). In the same way, we want to look for

occurrences of nother without the influence of the indefinite article, or really any

evidence of the word outside the context of a whole nother. Did we find this evidence?

No. The only two occurrences of nother in the full 20,000 words were both part of a

whole nother.

We can't draw any real conclusion from our results. If we only found two examples of

a phrase that we know people do say in 20,000 words, there's every chance in the world

that there simply weren't any examples of an independent nother in those few words.

Even the commonplace other only appeared twelve times, and another gave a bulkier but

still small 30 examples. Gathering 20,000 words took me three solid days—a simpler task

than running a human subject experiment, but still time-consuming. This sample size is

minute. Think how much writing gets posted to the Internet on a daily basis, how broad

the range of possible topics, socio-economic backgrounds of the typists, how many

hundreds or thousands of dialects are represented on the Internet. Gathering enough

material and controlling for those factors to pull statistically significant data without

building in a bias would be a Herculean task, and not one this mortal would dare to

undertake. That doesn't make this exercise entirely pointless—though we can't use the

results of my tiny corpora to make any claims, we can use them to ask better questions in

later research.

What we can see in this little bite of data, however, is that there is still no evidence

that nother gets used without a hanging about in close proximity. Nother stays safely

- 45 -
close to either another or a whole nother. At the risk of seeming to abuse a dead horse:

the only proof is a lack of disproof. In science, there's no fact, only evidence and theory.

The more evidence a theory has behind it, the more we can trust it to help us make

informed decisions about our interactions with the world. School children are taught the

idea of Newtonian gravity on a simplistic (i.e., partly incorrect) level: what comes up

must come down. We trust this idea to get us from point A to point B on a daily basis.

The math and physics behind it have consistently been held up by the fact that we do not

go flying off into space. What would it take to knock down this colossus of physics? Itty-

bitty little strings. That's it. Without going into the ethereal depths of quantum mechanics

(which I grok on only the most primitive level), the point is that it only takes one

experiment whose results can be duplicated to overturn even so celebrated a theory as

Newtonian physics and demand a new explanation of the data. Science operates on the

basis that something is true until and only until evidence is presented that disqualifies the

theory, or until another idea can explain the results more thoroughly and generate more

accurate predictions. This is a pillar of science that is not to be neglected.

Our hypothesis, as luck has it, has not been knocked down by this second step of the

examination, which means we can go on to step three: designing an experiment. We may

now attempt to draw the nature of nother out of the dusty corners of our speaking minds

and into the light of new knowledge. All clues point away from our null hypothesis thus

far, Watson, but there is work yet to be done.

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 CHAPTER FOUR
REGARDING NUTS & BOLTS

We now know a little about the phrase we're studying: a whole nother. We've looked at

how nother and another show up, historically speaking. We've examined the primary

contending phenomena that might explain our odd little construction (reanalysis and

infixing) in other contexts. We've also sampled the way people are currently using the

phrase in Internet discourse. Now we have a sense of how this word works both

historically and in a fairly current context. Having considered the possible theories in the

field and what we can know before the experiment, the next step is to consider how we

might go about testing the nature of nother within the realm of psycholinguistics, the

branch of linguistics concerned with how language works in the brain.

One fundamental supposition of psycholinguistics can be summed up quickly by

saying that production overrides input. That is to say that what we hear is not as

important as what our brain does with what we hear. We already talked about this

concept in Chapter 2. This idea suggests that when we hear something that's not quite

grammatically or phonologically correct, we can still walk away from a conversation

understanding what was said.

We can extend this principle to the way we produce speech: if we hear something

wrong and are asked to repeat what we heard, we tend to produce the sense of the

utterance more correctly than the form itself. For instance, you might tell me a story

about cows of various colors and then ask me to repeat the sentence "Ten burple and

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prown cows walked across the field." I would probably understand what you meant to say

and instead give you "Ten purple and brown cows walked across the field."

This tendency in human language use is vital to the success of any communication.

Without it, a normal conversation could, and quite likely would, degrade very quickly

into a comedy of errors. Did you ever play the game "Telephone" as a kid? The premise

is simple. All the players sit in a circle or line. Someone begins the game by whispering a

secret phrase into the ear of the next person, something like "The cow jumped over the

moon." Each person whispers what they heard into the ear of the next person, and the last

person in line says what they heard out loud. By that point, a perfectly sensible and

recognizable line has inevitably degraded to something nonsensical like "That sow-dump

dove for the spoon."

Without these changes, the game would offer no interest or challenge, but the changes

are also happening in a specific set of circumstances. The players, first of all, are usually

inclined toward silliness and willing to make odd things up. Secondly, they are

whispering to each other, so the input is phonologically impoverished and generally

doesn't give much in the way of facial clues to help clarify the sound. Lastly, there is no

context for what each player hears. If I heard someone say, "Hey diddle-diddle, the cat

and the fiddle," I would have every reason to expect to hear the speaker continue with

"The cow jumped over the moon." In a game like "Telephone," you could hypothetically

be hearing anything from a famous quote to a nonsense line that was composed just for

that round of the game.

Let's consider the testing environment. To answer our question, we can't really ask

our speaker (let's call her Maude) when she would use nother and when she wouldn't.

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Most of the knowledge we have of language is tacit rather than conscious. Almost (but

not quite) like breathing or pumping blood through our bodies, our minds handle

language so smoothly that we are largely unaware of what we say. And why we do we

say things in the way we do? Linguists still have much to learn. We therefore need to

elicit information about this subconscious sort of knowledge by inference: we need to

trick Maude into giving us hints about the actual mental process. Our understanding of

how we filter out mistakes is very useful in this case. If we have a guess at what is

happening, we can give Maude what would be considered a mistake under our hypothesis

and then see if she corrects it. In our experiment, for example, our hypothesis predicts

that nother will not act as a word independently of the construction a whole nother, or

constructions that similarly infix a word in the same place, conforming to the stress rules

of infixing in English. To test whether this restriction is actually happening in the way we

produce English, we need to ask Maude to repeat a sentence that puts nother where it

should not show up.

To be a bit more concrete, consider the sentence "That's a whole nother ball of wax."

Here, nother is only separated from a by an infix that our hypothesis would predict to be

acceptable. Maude should, if we are correct, generally repeat this sentence as it stands,

with a certain margin for speech and memory error. But what if we asked Maude to

repeat the sentence "There's this whole nother species of plants living under the rocks in

the woods"? We've left nother next to its favorite adverbial friend, but instead of

presenting a sentence that could be interpreted either as "a whole nother" or "a-whole-

nother," we've made sure that nother can only be seen as "this whole nother."37 Maude

has to make this assumption, because *thisnother is very clearly not a word.

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Theoretically speaking, if we work from the premise that humans generally won't

produce a phrase that they don't accept simply because they hear it, Maude will change

something if nother is not an acceptable word in her lexicon.

Before I go on to describe the test that I developed working from these assumptions,

there are several limitations to be wary of. The experimental environment is not truly

representative of the way we use language in normal life. It is, in fact, much more like

playing "Telephone" than it is like having a chat with your mother. When you're talking

with your mother, there is generally some social motivation to actually communicate

information that both parties understand.38 There's a certain degree of good manners that

governs our behavior in a conversation: if we do notice mistakes, we will either point

them out for the sake of humor/mockery, or we will let them pass to keep the

conversation from becoming awkward, as long as we understood the intent of the

communication. Whether we choose to carry on without comment or point out such a slip

of the tongue, we are doing so with an understanding that the choice will impact our

social relationship with our conversation partner. In an experiment, as in "Telephone," the

normal rules of conversation are suspended.

Unlike the game, however, the rules of interaction in an experiment are more difficult

to determine. We, as experimenters, cannot tell Maude how she should react if she

consciously notices the mistakes—to say "Repeat exactly what you hear," or "Correct

mistakes" or any similar directive would prime her to respond in a particular way,

influencing the data we can gather from her responses. If she does notice the mistakes

we're asking her to correct on a conscious and overt level, she will have to make a

decision, and that decision will also change the nature of the data.

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 We can never perfectly eliminate this dilemma, so we instead do our best to minimize

the chance that Maude will notice what we're focusing on. For each sentence that has

relevance to the test, we need to create distracter sentences that are similar in structure

and content but grammatically correct. The ratio linguists generally use is three

distracters for every one test item.39

The second major problem with the environment of an experiment, aside from the de-

socialization of a socially-grounded construct, is the lack of context. When your mother

slips up and says "burple and prown cows," there's a good chance that you were already

in the middle of having a conversation about oddly-hued bovines. In that context, it's easy

to make an inference about what she meant. As we discussed with "Telephone," you lose

that context in a game, making it easier to make mistakes. The sentences we give in this

experiment are lacking context, which necessarily makes the task of understanding the

sentence correctly more difficult for Maude. She may tend to repeat sentences with new

errors of her own simply because she misheard. She might even replicate a mistake by

phonological error—she might catch the sounds without the meaning, and repeat what

she is only parsing as complete gobbledygook. The only thing we can really do to

minimize this possible source of error in the data is to give her the clearest source

possible. The audio files used in the experiment were recorded and rerecorded for clarity

of articulation, for lack of background noise, and edited to eliminate distracting noises

and to make sure that the sentences all sound about the same as far as volume goes. We'll

give Maude good headphones and a quiet room to work in, but beyond these careful

precautions, we can only cross our fingers that her hearing and concentration are in good

form.

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 Repetition, otherwise known as elicited imitation, is a well-grounded methodology in

psycholinguistics, especially when looking at child language development. Child-

language researchers Lust, Flynn, and Foley give a good explanation of why this is a

valid tactic: "Imitation of new, complex behavior appears to wait until the child mind has

developed the 'cognitive structure' required for generation of the behavior." A 1968 study

by Piaget (referenced by Lust et. al.) shows that when it comes to imitating tongue

movements, babies won't repeat a motion that they don't already know how to do. Lust et.

al. conclude that "Imitation is not a passive copy; it reflects cognitive competence." What

they mean by this is that you can watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers all you like, but

it doesn't mean you'll be able jump up and start cutting a mean rug unless you already

know how to do what you've seen them do. This translates to language repetition in two

ways. Child language development is a hot topic in linguistics, and the focus of the Lust

paper. Imitation tasks can be used to determine when a child gains certain skills in

language, the idea being that if a reasonable population of a study is consistently

incapable of reproducing a certain type of phrase, then children gain that skill at an older

age than the test population. For our purposes, we can say that if Maude doesn't recognize

nother as a word in her cognitive framework for English, she won't use it in imitation.40

We've settled on repetition as our method, but what do we want to hear? We want

evidence of English speakers avoiding the use of nother as an independent word form.

We're specifically interested in this because of the phrase a whole nother, so we might

also want to hear how speakers respond to this phrase whose acceptability we already

have documented proof for, at least as a sort of partial control. I'm not sure how to walk

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you frontwards through the process of choosing the phrases to test, so we'll do this part

backwards. I'll tell you what I decided on and then I'll give you the why. Bear with me.

Each test will contain four different conditions to allow us to gather information

about our favorite phrase. These conditions are as follows: a whole nother, a whole other,

this whole other, and this whole nother. These phrases allow us to look at the behavior of

other in Maude's mind. There is no real contention that other is a word, and if nother is

also a word, we would expect it to behave much like other because of their similar

meaning and phonology. If nother is a word, Maude should theoretically be willing to use

it with both the indefinite article and the indefinite this. English has two different uses of

the word this. One is a counterpart to that: "I'll take this apple," meaning "I'll take this

specific apple as opposed to that one." The other, with which we are concerned in this

experiment, is used colloquially in a sense that is semantically very similar to the

indefinite article a/an: "So I was walking down the street the other day, and there was this

guy just sitting in the middle of the sidewalk…" We don't mean "this particular guy as

opposed to that one over there," we mean "a guy."

If the hypothesis we've developed is correct, we should expect speakers to be

perfectly comfortable using every condition except the last: this whole nother. What

we're trying to do, remember, is separate nother from the influence of a and see if it can

stand alone. If other is a word and can be uttered after both this and a, nother would tend

to follow suit—if it is a word. It's easy to want to say that because other is an independent

word in the phrase a whole other that nother is as well. The two phrases are so similar

semantically and syntactically that they beg comparison. Would you be able to substitute

this for a with other if you can't before nother? We need to keep in mind the other

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possible explanation, the possibility that another is simply being infixed with whole.

Under this explanation, nother is not acting as a word in your mind, but only as part of a

word.

Do you remember Superman and Lois Lane? Lois figured out that Clark Kent was

Superman, not because he told her, but because against all odds, she never saw them at

the same time. Lois couldn't force a direct confession out of Clark, so she jumped into the

river to force him to change into Superman in front of her in order to save her life. As a

thinking person, he wasn't as easily tricked as words are. But like Superman and Clark

Kent, words and phrases that look very similar might have secret identities that we can

reason out of them by indirect evidence. If nother is being processed differently in the

brain than other, they will not have the same abilities; they won't be able to fit into the

same spots in a sentence. A whole nother may look suspiciously like a whole other, but

can we separate the article from the phrase and have it work? I think not, but that's what

our test is designed to show.

Cavete Numeros

We have four test conditions, but what do we do with those? As we discussed, we have to

try to trick Maude into not noticing the question, so her own assumptions can't get in the

way of the experiment. We also need to gather enough examples to minimize the

likelihood that her response is merely a speech error or a fluke, which means giving her

more than one of each sentence type. Let's just say that, for the sake of placating the

university's ethics board, we limit the number of examples to three sentences of each type

for each subject. This gives us a total of twelve test sentences (three each of four different

- 54 -
conditions). Remember that, in order to disguise what we're actually wondering about, we

need 300% of our test items in distracters. That means 36 non-test sentences, making a

total of 48 sentences for each subject to listen to and repeat.

Having determined the numbers, the next step is to counterbalance the experiment.

The point of counterbalancing is to account for any unpredictable leftover factors that

could, nevertheless, impact the data. Consider this sentence: "There's this whole nother

level of meaning to Harry Potter, beyond the fun storyline." Maude might really despise

Harry Potter, for instance, which could distract her and make her repeat the sentence

differently than if she simply didn't care. I could never guess that before I sat her down to

take the test. Or she might mishear the final /s/ of there's and come up with some strange

concoction of a word that I wouldn't imagine because it's not what I intended her to hear.

Or she could be thinking about the previous sentence. All manner of odd little things

could pop into the equation and throw things off without so much as a by-your-leave to

us as the researchers. What we need to do, then, is to design the experiment such that

each critical element of the test is being presented in several different ways to groups of

test subjects.

We know that we want twelve different test sentences. Since each sentence could

have its own peculiarities, we don't want to accidentally write a bad sentence and then

have a third of our data on one of the conditions rendered entirely useless because

something unpredictable was going on. What we do, then, is write twelve sentences that

sound as natural as possible for the two conditions using other. We want to see if Clark

Kent (nother) can fill Superman's (other's) shoes. Once we have the sentences, we make

four versions of each sentence, one for each condition. Having done this for twelve

- 55 -
sentences, we now have 48 test sentences. We clearly can't give all 48 to one person,

first, because we would be repeating the test sentences, and second, because we would

then need to create three times as many distracters to match. Aside from being an

inordinate pain in the neck to write, record, and program, such a test would have Maude

and her cohorts coming after us with daggers in the night. If nothing else, it would be a

brutal and tedious amount of work to ask of a volunteer.

What we can do with the large number of test sentences is split them into groups

according to condition and then organize them by blocks. If we number the sentences one

through twelve and label each also according to a condition, we can easily look at them in

columns according to condition—let's label these alpha through delta.

To still have a test where each subject gets one of each sentence and three of each

condition, we can simply take the sentences in chunks of three and shift them right. Excel

makes this easy to organize:

Sentence01A Sentence01B Sentence01C Sentence01D

Sentence02A Sentence02B Sentence02C Sentence02D
Sentence03A Sentence03B Sentence03C Sentence03D
Sentence04D Sentence04A Sentence04B Sentence04C
Sentence05D Sentence05A Sentence05B Sentence05C
Sentence06D Sentence06A Sentence06B Sentence06C
Sentence07C Sentence07D Sentence07A Sentence07B
Sentence08C Sentence08D Sentence08A Sentence08B
Sentence09C Sentence09D Sentence09A Sentence09B
Sentence10B Sentence10C Sentence10D Sentence10A
Sentence11B Sentence11C Sentence11D Sentence11A
Sentence12B Sentence12C Sentence12D Sentence12A

Alpha Beta Gamma Delta

As you can see, each color represents one of the test conditions, which are also

labeled "A" through "D" here, and each column contains sentences one through twelve.

Each set of sentences will serve as a list for creating a test for Maude. This gives us four

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different tests, which would be given to four different people. We can use the same 36

distracters for each, and there we have our 48 sentences.

The next problem to tackle is ordering. We need to randomize the sentences, as good

experimental practice demands, in order to eliminate the possibility of subconsciously

arranging them in a way that could skew the data. We also need to keep the presentation

of test conditions fairly balanced, which means that we want the four different types of

test sentence fairly evenly (but still randomly) distributed across the test. This task can

also be accomplished using advanced Excel skills and a bit of trial-and-error voodoo.

This method may not sound very systematic, but it seems to be the modus operandus of

the field. I had trouble duplicating the process in order to explain it, so I called on the

professor who helped me randomize the test in the first place to clarify what we had

done. His response? "I have to mess with it every time to figure out what I did." The

important thing, however you choose to get there, is that for each third of the distracter

sentences, you have one each of the four test conditions, and the sentences must be

randomly organized (Appendix C).

Once you have four randomized tests, do it again. Even the random order of the

computer could produce some odd connection between test items that changes the data in

a completely unpredictable way. This part is simple: we take the four tests that we have,

rinse, and repeat the process of randomizing with blocks. Voila! Now we have eight

distinct orderings of the test presenting four different sets of the test conditions, which

should satisfy even the pickiest of scientists.

The process of devising a viable experiment may seem a bit extreme in its need to

sort and randomize, but it points out a very important part of the scientific method: error.

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When you're exploring anything, be it the human mind or Antarctica, you're going

forward into a territory that hasn't been fully charted. If it had been, you wouldn't be there

for the sake of trying to figure out something new. Whenever we're in unknown waters,

we have to remember that while it may mostly contain all the usual run of aquatic life

we'd expect to find, there may also be some new species waiting to jump out at us. It's

vital to recognize the limitations of our own knowledge, and also to understand the lens

that we bring to the study. If we're hanging out with Darwin on the HMS Beagle and we

stumble across a type of bird on an unexplored island that looks suspiciously like a

reptile, it would be easy for us to say, "Oh, of course that's a reptile," if we're expecting to

see only what we know. If we're expecting to not know what we're looking at, we'll be

more attentive and perhaps notice that the scaly-looking skin is, in fact, a bizarre sort of

feather. By randomizing, we're saying that we don't know what the study will do, but

we're doing our best to clear away any hunches we have that might inadvertently be

impacting the data. This is also an admission that we don't know what's going on with

every little facet of the world, so we're creating enough options, that if an unpredictable

problem invalidates some percentage of the results, the bulk of the data should at least be

reliable. The only factor that can't be counterbalanced for is chance. That's why God

invented statisticians.

The Deed Itself

We've got almost all of the main ingredients for a viable experiment now. We have the

methodology of repetition. We have the conditions we will test and the logic of why. We

have a proper proportion of distracters. The orders of the eight tests are carefully

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counterbalanced and randomized. The sentences are all created and recorded, waiting

peacefully among the binary stars to be heard by Maude and the twenty-three dwarves.41

Like a mediocre stand-up comic, the only thing we're missing is the delivery.

For all that devising, recording, randomizing, and counterbalancing the experiment's

content took some care to think through, execute, and explain, it was a fairly

straightforward process for me. I had that part of the experiment settled in late

September. No problem. Then came the real question: How do I get Maude and company

to actually take the test?

There are a number of different software options in the world for designing a

computer interface for an experiment. I thought, somehow, that in the lovely world of

idiot-proof software there would be something that would allow me to do a bit of clicking

and dragging to produce a mini-program that would allow Maude to sit down at the

computer, listen to the sentences, press a button to reply or go forward, while recording

her responses. Silly me.

The first trouble with that idea was recording the responses. Apparently it's not that

easy to set up a way for the computer to capture spoken responses within the context of

such a simple interface. This problem was solved easily enough. The Linguistics

Department has a high-end digital recorder that makes it a simple task to transfer the

recorded files to the computer after the test is complete. We made that decision early on.

I was still set on having the computer do the testing work, however, which would

have been ideal. It would have freed me to do other things while my test subjects were

doing the test, for one thing, and it would have also taken one more human factor out of

the testing process. Software and licensing being what it is, the only program available to

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me for the design of this experiment was a Mac-based monster called Psyscope that

predates the Internet. No joke. It had nearly gone extinct a while back, but has very

recently been undergoing a resurrection by some resourceful Italian programmers who

have not yet had a chance to update the manual in accordance with their new

programming.

I won't bore you with the details of my struggle, but after more than a month and

many, many hours of battling with this leviathan, I came to the undeniable realization that

I have no talent for working with a quasi-programming platform. Four minutes and

twenty seconds after I gave up, it dawned on me that I could have solved the problem by

importing my orderings into Itunes as a playlist six weeks ago. Never say that science

lacks irony.

I don't want to overlap too much with the actual running of the experiment here, but

I'm not quite done with the development of the delivery method. When I ran my first

subject using an Itunes list, I had the sudden and horrible realization that Itunes is not a

good program to use when you want to play one and only one track. I started to run the

first test and realized that I couldn't hit pause quickly enough to keep the computer from

going into the next track, making an already difficult memory task absolutely heinous by

distracting Maude from what she was supposed to remember before she had a chance to

repeat it.42

The moral of this story is two-fold. First: Simple solutions for presenting an

experiment shouldn't be overlooked. Second: Test the simple solution on a friend before

you try it with a subject.

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 In the end, after a hurried scramble to find a fix for the unviable Itunes option before

my next subject arrived, I ended up making eight folders on a Mac and putting copies of

all the appropriate sentence for one test order in each. I then gave the file names a number

according to where they belonged in the test. The way that a Mac organizes files

generated a properly-ordered list that I was then able to scroll through simply and finitely

by using the preview option in the Apple Finder. If you're not a Mac user, this just means

that I could play the files without opening them in a program, simply by clicking on a

"play" button by the file name. This worked quite nicely.

Problems with Data Gathering

We've got our test designed and, at long last, working. The hard part is over, right? Now

we can just sit back, relax, and push a button. In our dreams. We're dealing with human

beings, unfortunately, not mold cultures, and that means that Maude and every single one

of her friends will present us with a different challenge.

I passed over the matter of human subject research in talking about the experimental

design to make the process as straightforward as possible, but we need to come back to it.

Any time research deals with humans, the researchers need to prove that their work is

worth the risk it presents to the subjects. Each university has a board that must, by federal

law, review or exempt from review all studies using human subjects before the

experiment can legally proceed. The point of the review is essentially to weigh the risks

against the benefits: What could happen to a subject in a worst case scenario? How likely

is this to happen? Are you trained properly to administer such a test to the particular

population you propose to study?

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 Some populations are deemed to be more "at risk" than others. Children, for example,

or any people who for reasons of language or mental state are less able to give informed

consent are considered at risk because its easier to exploit those who are less likely to

possess the capacity to speak up for themselves if they're uncomfortable with the

research. Most studies in human research are, for that reason, required to gather signed

consent form from their participants. These forms essentially outline the process of the

experiment and inform the subject of their rights. (Appendix B, Part 2) The basic rights

of any subject are fairly commonsense. We can't force them to participate: even if they

begin the experiment, they will be allowed to stop at any time for any reason.

The idea of "forcing" someone to participate can go beyond levels that you might

think of offhand. The population we have available for this study, for example, is my

advisor's introductory linguistics class. Part of the curriculum has always been that the

students need to participate in one of the experiments going on in the department, and

Dana kindly donated her new students to this experiment this fall, for which I am

thoroughly grateful. Participation is part of the grade for the class, but because we cannot

penalize people for choosing not to be a subject in any research, we need to inform them

that they can request an alternative assignment to meet the assignment criteria.

For our purposes, we're using adults who are not known to be at risk and our

experiment itself poses no risk other than a chance of temporary boredom, so the review

process is simple. In some cases, however, this process is less straightforward and it pays

to be prepared. The review process could take three months between getting the board to

examine your proposal, having to implement their revisions, and having them review it

again. Whatever university you're studying at, find our their process for review as early

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as possible, make sure you have the appropriate certifications, and get your proposal in

sooner rather than later. That being said, handing in a careless proposal three times is

more time-consuming than handing in a well-crafted proposition once, so spend the time

to prepare your proposal carefully to their standards, and make sure you have an advisor

or colleague go through it with you thoroughly. A stitch in time saves nine, right?43

We're not done with people yet. Even once we get approval to proceed with our

experiment, and even once we've recruited and scheduled the experiments, people are

going to cause us difficulty. Dana's class, for example, had about 35 students enrolled this

fall, and all were given the assignment to contact me and set up a time to participate in

the experiment. Some we'll lose because they'd rather do the alternative assignment, some

because they don't really care about that part of their grade. Some will make an

appointment with good intentions and then apologetically forget to show up. Three times.

Some will have schedules that simply don't work with the available lab times. A prospect

and respectable population of 35 dwindles very, very quickly to 17. Advertising for

subjects on campus, as is required by the laws of volunteer recruiting (to give everyone

equal access to any potential benefits of the study) then produces a few more. Ideally, I

would have gathered usable data from 40 subjects, but in reality, I only managed to get

22. There are two problems that this number presents. First, it's tiny, though that is offset

a bit by the particular design we used, as I'll explain in Chapter 5. Second, it’s not

divisible by eight, which is the number of orderings we created. This means that, while

we have an equal number of presentations of each of our four test conditions, we do not

have an equal representation of all sentences within those test conditions and of those

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sentences in context of the distracters. This can be accounted for in the statistics, but it

does weaken our result.

The final hurdle with running the experiment is running the experiment. The task we

designed is hard. Deliberately hard, to be sure—we designed it that way as part of our

plot to draw out the unbiased truth about the cognitive reality of nother. But people don't

always enjoy doing difficult tasks, especially when we can't explain to them exactly why

it has to be so frustrating. When Maude stumbles over a sentence, or fails to remember

something that sounded simple, she might be embarrassed, or think that there's something

wrong with her. She might get frustrated and stressed, and start making more mistakes.

She might get horribly, horribly bored. As researchers, it is imperative that we recognize

that we're not dealing with data machines. We're dealing with people who have emotions

and reactions. Just sitting there pressing the button to move the test along is not enough.

We need to pay attention to how each subject is responding to the test and make it easier,

without compromising the data. Simple comments like, "Don't let it stress you, you're

doing really well," and "Just a few more to go" can go a long way to keeping the test

environment from becoming too clinical.

The next and final hurdle may seem simplistic, but it came as a surprise to me while I

was running the experiments. We, as researchers, are also human. We've already

discussed how our own humanity can make it difficult to sort out the biases we're

inclined to have, but what about sitting there pressing that button, listening to the same 84

sentences over, and over, and over? If Maude has the potential to get bored in a single

half-hour experiment, how much more boring is it liable to be if we're sitting there

running it 22 times? And it's critical to Maude's performance that the researcher seem

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interested and engaged. When you don't seem to buy into the game that you're asking

them to play, how can they themselves engage in it? Even when you notice interesting

things in Maude's responses that perk your interest, it's difficult to do all the data

gathering alone. That's one of the reasons that research internships exist. Data gathering

can be tedious and exhausting, but it's well worth the reward. We need to remember, as

we're sitting there desperately trying to stay awake, that once we've survived the running

of the experiment, we'll be a mere few hours worth of coding and statistics away from

knowing what the data says about our hypothesis.

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 CHAPTER FIVE
DATA & CONCLUSIONS

Before we get into the results and statistics, let's step back a minute and remember what

we're trying to find out. What we want to know is whether or not nother is a word,

correct? We determined that the best way to do this is count how many times we could

trick people into using nother without the indefinite article preceding the modifier. In

other words, would they ever say this whole nother, and if so, how often would they say

it in comparison to a whole nother, this whole other, and a whole other? We're equal

opportunity researchers, so we set the test up in such a way that this whole nother had an

equal and unbiased chance to perform exactly like the other phrases. We've run the test,

talked about some difficulties with the test, and now comes the moment you've all been

waiting for. Can I get a drum roll, please?

A whole nother: 72
A whole other: 47
This whole nother: 8
This whole other: 52

Ta da!! What? Doesn't that mean anything to you? No? Funny, me neither. Let's think it

through. We administered the test 22 times, correct? If there are 12 test sentences in each

one, that give us 264 sentences where we expect the test subject to produce one of our

phrases, or something semantically similar. Repetition being what it is, they won't always

produce anything particularly relevant. That gives us four possible categories for our data

points to fall into, and those are listed above. Try looking at this chart instead:

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 The horizontal axis indicates the input phrase—the test condition given to Maude.

Each of the columns indicates the actual response the speakers gave to the input. These

are calculated as percentages, but the numbers will not equal a hundred. For each of the

test phrases, there were a certain number of responses where people either used a

different variation on the sort of phrase we asked for, such as an entirely different, or they

left out the phrase altogether. Looking at that data doesn't speak directly to our

hypothesis, so we won't deal with it right now (See Appendix D). Even of this data, not

all of it will be helpful in formulating a statement about our hypothesis, which should

lead us to ask: What does this data mean in terms of our hypothesis?

The easiest way to see that is to put our hypothesis into numbers. Or rather, put our

hypotheses into numbers. Why plural? Because in order to determine whether our

carefully formulated guess is correct, we have to know what we're looking for if it's not

correct. The way research deals with that is a very simple rule: for every hypothesis, there

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is a null hypothesis. The null hypothesis, remember, is what we predict will not happen.

So, let's call our real hypothesis H1 and our null hypothesis H0. To figure out how to

phrase them in numerical terms, for the moment it's sufficient to imagine what the

numbers will look like. If H1 is true, then the number of times a whole nother, a whole

other, and this whole other are produced (let's call that variable a) will be much higher

than the number of times this whole nother is produced (variable b). We expect to see

that speakers can use a construction involving nother, because we expect to confirm what

we know already—it's a part of the English language. For the same reason, we don't

expect to find any trouble with the phrases using other. If our hypothesis is correct,

however, we won't see much of the phrase that uses nother outside of an explicit case of

infixing. So, our two hypotheses, strictly in terms of data prediction and entirely separate

from the meaning we might give to the data, should look like this:

H1 is true if a < b by a certain percent.

H0 is true is a = b within a certain percent.

We can't take the number of instances for each condition, add them up, and figure a

percent. One variable has the potential to influence another, which means that we have to

look at averages for each test in terms of each variable for each individual subject. We

can't lump Maude and all her friends together, nor can we lump all of Maude's responses

together. We have to devise a test that will calculate the average use of the different

phrases for each speaker and then compare those individual numbers to one another. I

know—it's not the most intuitive concept to grasp. But think of it this way: If Bill Gates

walks into a bar, the mean income of everyone there suddenly skyrockets. Does this also

mean that everyone in the bar suddenly becomes wealthier? Of course not. If Maude

loves to say a whole nother and uses it for each of the twelve test sentences, that's going

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to drive the average of utterances up if we lump all of the subjects together. That doesn't

help us establish a more accurate idea of how English speakers use the phrase in general,

just as the mean salary of people in Bill Gates' bar does nothing to tell us how much most

of those individuals make.44 What we need is a statistical test that will allow us to see all

of an individual's responses both in terms of what their singular responses and in terms of

what we prompted them to say.

The statistical analysis that has to happen to this data is complex and, quite frankly,

baffling. I spent three and a half hours working with two linguists who have been running

experiments and calculating results for close to as long as I've been alive, and in that

lengthy conversation, the possibility of wanting to talk to the professional statisticians

came up. I'm not going to attempt to explain the details of the math to you because once

we got the data organized and stripped down to the relevant factors, we entered them into

an impressive program called Systat, chose a type of analysis called an "ANOVA," hit

"calculate," and sat back to wait for the answer. The people who devise these programs, I

have to trust, know their business. Ours is, most critically, to know what factors matter

and what test to choose. If you have the gumption to go out and understand the math

more thoroughly for yourself, I would encourage that heartily. Unfortunately, I can't help

you much further along because I have not learned the inner workings of this tool.45

The next section is going to be a comment-free presentation of the data. When

publishing data, the appropriate protocol is to give the results first and your interpretation

of them following. This allows other researchers to look at your work and make their own

judgments about the data, free of the author's opinions. Don’t worry if you get a little lost

in the numbers. We'll meet back up on the other end to chat about what we found.

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Presentation of Data

In order to assess the reliability of the patterns evident in the data, we isolated the cases

where the output phrase was the same as the input phrase. In this analysis each individual

was represented by the four means reflecting how frequently they exactly reproduced the

target expression in their output in each of the four conditions. The four means are given

in the following table:

other nother average

a whole 1.32 1.55 1.43

this whole 1.18 .36 .77

average 1.25 .95

Table: Mean correct reproduction of target phrase per condition. (The maximum

possible score in a cell is 3. N = 22.)

A statistical analysis of this 2 x 2 within subjects design showed that there was a

reliable main effect for the a/this contrast F(1,21) = 15.8, p < .001. There was no main

effect of other/nother ( p > .1). Most importantly, there was a reliable interaction between

these factors, F(1,21) = 13.7, p < .001.

The reliable difference between a and this means that there were significantly more

correct imitation of sentences that used a rather than this. The lack of such an interaction

between other and nother means that there was not a significantly larger correct

repetition of other or nother sentences. The interaction between these two contrasts

demonstrates that when you calculate the other/nother difference within the a/this

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contrast, there is a significant difference. In other words, other was correctly imitated

more times than nother, but only when used with this, not with a.

Okay…Now What?

The most important sentence of the data presentation section is this: "Most importantly,

there was a reliable interaction between these factors, F(1,21) = 13.7, p < .001." The p-

value is the holy grail of research. It's the number that tells us whether or not we can rely

on what we think our data is saying. "P" stands for "probability," and what it tells us is

the chance that our null hypothesis is true. In psychology, the p-value needs to be .05 or

lower to be considered statistically significant, which can also be read as 1/20. Our

number here can be translated to say that the chances are 1/1000 that our null hypothesis

actually is correct and that the apparent differences we found in the data were a fluke.

The interaction the p-value is measuring in our case is how our two sets of variable: a/this

and other/nother work with each other. Other and nother were repeated correctly more or

less the same—there's a slightly higher occurrence of other, but only slight. The telling

thing is that the slight difference between those variables happens in context of our

second variable: other was used more than nother, but only with this. That interaction is

what the golden p-value is measuring.

So what does this number really mean to our question? Does it give us an answer? It's

easy to get overexcited about a number and shout to the mountain tops that you were

right about your entire hypothesis, but remember that much of science is more about

disproof than proof. Our data has shown with significant reliability that nother does not

seem to act independently from the indefinite article. We've seen this not only in our test

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results, but also hints of it in the corpora and in the study of the OED. Because of the

consistent lack of evidence for nother as its own word, we can say with confidence that it

is highly unlikely that reanalysis is responsible for our ability to use the phrase a whole

nother. If nother truly were taking on an identity as its own word, then we should see it

popping up somewhere on its own. We don't.

Trickier to answer is the question of why we can say a whole nother. My initial

thought, stemming from the two initial explanations we came across, is that the phrase is

simply the result of infixing. From what work has been done on infixing, we know that

English's rule about the use and placement of infixes is that (1) they add emotive

emphasis and (2) they follow a specific rhythmic pattern. A whole nother fits within this

description, and by Occam's Razor, infixing offers an appealing explanation.46 Finding

direct evidence for infixing being the correct story to explain our data is a more difficult

task. Send me your results when you find a way—I'd be fascinated to see them. Making a

case strong enough to take an idea into the realm of widely accepted theory is a process

that takes many different types of tests that systematically eliminate other possibilities

and consistently make correct predictions about the behavior of the phrase. As with all

good science, such a process takes time and hard work.

When we began looking at the ideas that swarmed around a whole nother only two

really emerged. I took the tactic of trying to build a case either for or against the one I

thought less plausible, that of reanalysis. I happen to think, personally, that infixing is a

strong contender, but that doesn’t mean that these are the only two possible explanations.

Even if infixing is a good, supportable reason for the existence of a whole nother, it

might not be single-handedly responsible for the phrase. In fact, it's probably not. Most of

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speech is a complex interaction between sounds. Our perception likes to override the

nuances of many of these interactions, but in doing so, it leads to language change based

on phonology.

In the case of a whole nother, we're dealing with an /l/ followed by /n/. Many of the

languages of our world exhibit countless attestations of the flexibility between these two

sounds. For example, several Native American languages of the northern Midwest have

evidence of dialects that used /l/ where they now use /n/. Cree, to look at one, has dialects

that now use /l/, /n/, and /y/. In Ojibwe, better known as Chippewa, the old /l/ has become

an /n/. The same holds true for Menominee, Potawatomi, and Meskwaki. In Penobscot, a

northeast American language, and its near neighbors, /l/s that used to appear at the

beginning of a word are now all /n/s, though the /l/s found in the middle and at the end of

words remain in contrast with the /n/. Cantonese, and other Chinese languages, frequently

demonstrate the same shift.47 The point here is that /l/ and /n/ have a wobbly relationship

with one another. If analogy with another construction or uncertain word division led to

the possibility of an /n/, perhaps the final /l/ of whole is a particularly welcoming

environment to that sound.

Do you recall the single example of the notheren we came across in the OED? There

seems to be recognition of the potential wordliness of nother across time, but perhaps the

partially functional semantic nature of the word another resists changing entirely. We

might look then to the way that these words that straddle the boundary between

functional and meaningful tend to change over time. Earlier in the text I told you a story

about how my sisters and I mixed up the words hungry and hundred. This type of

confusion is permitted by the similar phonetics of the words. Both have the same initial

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syllable, which is also accented in the meter of the song, leaving room for the final

syllable to be weak and easily lost.

Speech errors, including the sort that consistently lead to language change, are not

random. If the language center of the brain were a vast library, you might see the words

organized, Dewey-fresh, by meaning, articulation, and grammatical function. Imagine

your grammar school librarian—the sharp old lady with the horn-rimmed glasses who

actually could find any book someone described as "about so big, reddish, with a dog on

front," and find it in a split second, even if someone stole her glasses. Our brains are that

good and better, but when we move that fast, it's likely that we'll occasionally grab the

wrong word off the shelf. Because the books are so rationally organized, however, there

is bound to be some core similarity between what you said and what you intended to say.

It's possible, then, that nother might have tended towards wordhood over the course

of English by analogy of the pair other/nother with a functionally similar pair such as

ever/never. We saw examples in the OED of nother appearing as a negative form, just as

never has a specifically negative sense. Both pairs are words that straddle the line

between content and function words. Both have two syllables apiece, the final of each

being the same, unstressed /er/ sound. Because the specific natures of their meaning and

functionality are different, and because their stressed syllables are fairly easily

distinguished from one another, it's not likely that we'll frequently be tempted to use

other where we meant ever. It is very likely that our librarian will, however, be inclined

to catalogue other as having the same negation as ever, leading to a place in the lexicon

for nother.

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 Even if such an analogy might welcome nother, there might be good reason for other

to resist teaming up with nother on the ever/never paradigm. Ever/never have distinct

positive and negative qualities. They share the responsibilities of meaning nicely. Other

might be handling the negative sense very well on its own, thank you very much. As I

mentioned earlier, there's a hypothesis in semantics that suggests that no two words with

the exact same meaning will co-exist peacefully for long. And what does other really

mean? It means "Not this one." By being “other” from something, there's an implication

of the other thing being "not something else that has been specified." The way post-

modern philosophers such as Edward Said use other points to that sense of the word. He

uses the term Other to describe the way we perceive people who we fear because they are

not part of our community.48 Other can certainly have milder senses of that negative

quality, but it's always there. Of course, ever can take on negative connotations as well,

as in, "Is he ever going to leave?" Unlike other, however, ever has specifically positive

senses: "I'll love you forever and ever." If other is already the word with a negative sense,

it might resist pairing up with the enticingly negative initial /n/ of nother because it

doesn't need a specialist to take over.

These are just a few ideas that could lead to further approaches to the investigation of

the nature of a whole nother. There are many more ideas that I couldn't hope to touch on

in this project, ideas that might eventually contribute dramatically to our understanding

both of how a whole nother works and how our very minds process language. Each idea,

every possible road to filling in the puzzle, is another opportunity for a researcher to pick

up the thread of conversation behind us and study a new question. That's some of the

poetry in science: the small studies we manage to conduct become added to what

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humanity knows about the world. As we seek piece by tiny piece to pick apart the

workings of the human mind, we add to a collective memory that becomes synthesized

into a cultural perspective on the world, which in turn helps to determine the questions

that are formulated to frame the steps forward in understanding.

Final Thoughts

In case you dozed off at any point during our long journey together, here's the quick

recap: after we have studied the behavior of nother in English by conducting a word

study in the OED, building a corpora of Internet-based text, and carrying out an

experiment in psycholinguistics, we have found evidence supporting the claim that nother

does not appear as a word that can be used independently of the indefinite article. The

experiment confirmed this with a p-value of .001. We take this to mean that reanalysis is

therefore not a likely explanation for the existence of the phrase a whole nother. As an

alternative, we propose that a whole nother could be reasonably explained by what is

known of infixing in English.

I hope that walking through the development of this experiment with me has given

you a path to make the process of science less intimidating and shed a bit more light into

dim corners. Taking the time to walk through those paths has been, for me, an

introspective exploration on what it means to be a linguist. When I began my studies at

USM, linguistics was, in my mind, just a path to learning word etymologies. I didn’t

think much about the nature of my discipline until I was working on making my work

easy for a lay audience to understand. When I realized what linguistics really is, I looked

up from my computer and said, “Oh my gosh, I’m a scientist!” I never expected that to

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happen—I was a band geek and English nerd who used to skip high school biology class

to practice my clarinet. Science isn’t an elitist practice; it simply examines one very small

piece of the world at a time, and does the job thoroughly. I hope my exploration of this

science has emerged as a coherent set of signposts that draws a web between the study of

language in culture and the mind, demonstrating the interdisciplinary interactions that are

such a core of both the field of linguistics and the Honors Program at USM.

Take these words if they help you, dear reader, and use them. May they be of some

use as you seek to shine more light on this mysterious world we share.

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 POST SCRIPT
From Wayne Cowart, Chair of Linguistics at USM, following my thesis defense:

Other/Nother in the Google 1T Corpus

16 Feb 2008

This note reports the result of some corpus searches relevant to the status of "nother" (as
in "a whole 'nother thing") in English.
Thorsten Brants and Alex Franz of Google Research have released the "Web 1T 5-
gram Corpus Version 1.1" corpus through the Penn Language Data Consortium. This
corpus is based on a sample of approximately one trillion words of English text collected
from publicly accessible web pages before 1 February 2006. While the text samples were
automatically filtered to eliminate non-English samples, some text from languages other
than English was included in the corpus.
This corpus was then automatically examined to determine the frequency of each of
the single words it contained, as well as the frequency of each two-word, three-word,
four-word and five-word sequence. The summary given below is based on a search of
this corpus.
For present purposes the corpus was searched to determine the relative frequency of
the four target expressions listed in the table below, which also shows the frequency
count for each expression.

Target Expression Frequency Count

----------------- ----------------------------

a whole other 144,435

a whole nother 11,650 (0.08 of the above)

this whole other 4,168

this whole nother 0

If "nother" appeared in the frame "this whole _" at the same relative frequency as it does
in "a whole _" then there should be about 336 instances of "a whole nother" in the corpus.
In fact there were none. If in fact the relative frequency of "other" and "nother" in the
two frames were the same, it is unlikely that the observed frequency of instances of
"nother" in the frame "the whole _" would have fallen so low as it did here, chi-square =
336, df = 1, p < .001.

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 NOTES
Introduction

1 Schmidt, 2004.
2 AHCD, s.v. "science."
3 Dethier, 1963.
4 See, for example: http://www.usu.edu/beetle/research_bark_beetle.htm.

Chapter 1

5 ACHD, s.v. "linguistics."

6 See Apendix A for glossary terms and notes on formatting.
7 The databases I used, which you should be searching if you're doing language
research, are the following: Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts,
Academic Search Premier, PscyInfo, Project MUSE, Academic Search Premier
and JSTOR. These are a few of the databases available through a university's
library, and many of them are very specific to a field, or even a subdivision of a
field. Talk to your reference librarians if you're having trouble finding
information—they can usually point you to the right database for your topic.
8 Literally, the website's sole reason for existing is to communicate this message. If
you don't believe me, give it a visit, and allow yourself a moment of astonishment
that someone actually pays money to maintain this message. Prescriptive
language students are apparently quite adamant about their views on occasion, but
then, who isn't?
9 OED, s.v. "apron."
10 Ibid, s.v. "nickname."
11 ACHD, s.v. "nother."
12 Fox, 2003.
13 Fromkin, Rodman, and Hyams, 2003: 79. Emphasis added.
14 McMillan, 1980.
15 McCawley, 1978.
16 See Adams 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2004. Michael Adams did write a number of
interesting but fairly insubstantial articles making some observations about
interposing (think of it as a sort of expletive infixing for phrases instead of
words), and he draws a certain and interesting connection to infixing in some
cases. Strong evidence, however, is still wanting.

Chapter 2

17 See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=a-whole-nother.
18 Greene, 2003: 16. The unified field theory is called the "Theory of Everything,"
abbreviated "T.O.E." by those in physics. This has no relevance to my thesis, but
it amuses me, so I thought I'd share.

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19 See Pinker, 1994: 153-189. Phonology and the whys and hows are an interesting
part of any linguistic inquiry. This thesis will cover the principles of phonology in
only a cursory manner, as pertains to the question at hand.
20 Bollard, 1979: 102.
21 See Feipel, 1929. Examples of word with a pronounced /h/ would include history
and heritage, compared with the silent /h/ that appears in heir and hour. In these
latter cases, the /h/ is treated as a vowel with strong consistency.
22 Bollard, 1979: 102-103.
23 Koster, 2005: 18. Koster is a game designer, musician, and writer. This particular
book is about what makes games fun, but in order to come up with his theory, he
breaks down some fairly high level cognitive science that is directly relevant to
how we process speech.
24 See Ladefoged, 2005: 32-39, 49-61.
25 OED, s.v. "apron."
26 For a more formal look at this process, see Campbell, 1999: 117-118. For
examples in other Indo-European languages, see Partridge, 1952.
27 The example is popularly attributed to George Bernard Shaw who was an
adamant supporter of spelling reform, but may have come instead from an
anonymous spelling reformist of the same era.
28 Well, nearly the same, at least. Writing systems reflect the phonology of the
language more accurately the newer they are. The disconnect between the writing
and the phonology of a language comes largely from the fact that languages
change much faster than their writing systems do. A linguist studying our writing
system two hundred years from now would have a much harder time of it than I
would studying Old English.
29 AHCD, s.v. "nother."
30 See Fox, 2003.
31 Hendricks, 2004. Emphasis added for consistency of convention.
32 OED, s.v. "nother."
33 Ibid, s.v. "'nother."
34 Ibid, s.v. "nother."

Chapter 3

35 MacWhinney, 2000.
36 See Arnold, et al. The Internet is a new tool, and as our technology to search and
draw information from this tool improve, more linguists are beginning to use
material gleaned from it as evidence in their work.

Chapter 4

37 By using the hyphens, I'm positing a coherent word that has been interrupted with
an infix, rather than three separate words.
38 Theoretically speaking, that is, though we all know how easily this falls apart:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmecyCCdknk
39 Salkind, 2006: 128. He deals with multiple choice tests, but the principle applies.

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40 Lust et. al., 1998: 56.
41 Selecting a population size to test can be tricky, but in this case I'm limited by
available subjects and time. The number needs to be divisible by eight in order to
preserve the statistical logic of counterbalancing, and the subjects to me are
mostly comprised of an intro level college course with 35 students. They won't all
end up participating, of course, so the best you can do is take the largest
population size that the pragmatics allow.
42 Maude started out as a hypothetical subject, but I will continue to use her name
and gender to refer to my real subjects for the sake of preserving anonymity.
43 For a good overview and training on the history and definitions of human subject
research, go through the U.S. National Institutes of Health module, available at
http://cme.cancer.gov/clinicaltrials/learning/humanparticipant-protections.asp

Chapter 5

44 Thanks to Wayne Cowart for this example and clarification.

45 I can at least point you to some resources. See Salkind 2006, 145-184. See also
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Kracht/courses/mathling2/statistics.pdf
46 Occam's Razor is the rule of thumb that says out of any number of possible
explanations, the simplest will most likely be correct. The universe, in other
words, is no Rube Goldberg.
47 Quinn, 2008.
48 Said, 1994.

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 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adams, Michael. "Another Effing Euphemism." American Speech: A Quarterly of
Linguistics Usage 74, no. 1 (1999): 110-12.

———. "Infixing and Interposing in English: A New Direction." American Speech: A

Quarterly of Linguistics Usage 76, no. 3 (2001): 327-31.

———. "Meaningful Interposing: An Accidental Form." American Speech: A Quarterly

of Linguistics Usage 77, no. 4 (2002): 2.

———. "Meaningful Infixing: A Nonexpletive Form." American Speech: A Quarterly of

Linguistics Usage 79, no. 1 (2004): 110-12.

American Heritage College Dictionary, 4th ed.

Arnold, Doug, Louisa Sadler, and Aline Villavicencio. "Portuguese: Corpora,

Coordination and Agreement" (Unpublished paper, Universities of Essex, UK and
Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil).

Bollard, J. K. "A or An?" American Speech: A Quarterly of Linguistics Usage 54, no. 2
(1979): 102-07.

Byington, Steven T. and J. S. Kenyon. "'A' and 'An' before 'H'." American Speech: A
Quarterly of Linguistics Usage 5, no. 1 (1929): 82-85.

Campbell, Lyle. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. (Cambridge, The MIT Press:

1999).

Dethier, Vincent Gaston. To Know a Fly. (New Holden: 1963).

Feipel, Louis N. "'A' and 'An' before 'H' and Certain Vowels." American Speech: A
Quarterly of Linguistics Usage 4, no. 6 (1929): 442-54.

Fox, Naomi, ed. <fox@linguistlist.org> "A Whole Nother Thing." 24 October 2003.
http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2909.html

Fromkin, Victoria, Robert Rodman, and Nina Hyams. An Introduction to Language.

(Boston, Thomson Heinle: 2003).

Greene, Michael. The Elegant Universe. (New York, Random House: 2003).

Hendricks, Kent. "A Whole Nother: Infixation, Reanalysis, and Syntactic Blending, Oh
My!" (Term paper, Calvin College: 2004). (21 August 2007)
http://www/calivin.edu/weblogs/language/more/whole_nother_paper/

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Koster, Raph. A Theory of Fun for Game Design. (Arizona, Paraglyph Press: 2005).

Ladefoged, Peter. Vowels and Consonants. (Malden, Blackwell: 2005).

Lust, Barbara, Suzanne Flynn, and Claire Foley. "What Children Know about What They
Say: Elicited Imitation as a Research Method for Assessing Children's Syntax," in
Methods for Assessing Children's Syntax, ed. Dana McDaniel, Cecile McKee, and
Helen Smith Cairns. (Cambridge, The MIT Press: 1998), 55-76.

MacWhinney, B. The CHILDES project: Tools for analyzing talk. 3rd ed. (New Jersey,
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: 2000).

Marck, Louis. "Metanalysis." In Studies in Honor of J. Alexander Kerns, ed. Robert C.

Lugton and Milton Saltzer (The Hague, Mouton: 1970), 81-83.

McCawley, James. "Where You Can Shove Infixes," In Syllables and Segments, ed. Alan
and J. B. Hooper Bell (Amsterdam, North-Holland: 1978), 213-221.

McDaniel, Dana and Wayne Cowart, "Late Acquisition of the a/an Distinction: A
Problem for Frequency-based Accounts" (Unpublished paper, University of
Southern Maine: 2003).

McMillan, James B. "Infixing and Interposing in English." American Speech: A

Quarterly of Linguistics Usage (1980): 163-83.

Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed.

Partridge, Eric. "Articled Nouns." In From Sanskrit to Brazil. (London: 1952), 103-28.

Pinker, Steven, The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language. (New York,
HarperCollins: 1994).

Quinn, Conor McDonough. Email to author, 26 January 2008.

Salkind, Neil J. Exploring Research. 6 ed. (New Jersey, Prentice Hall: 2006).

Said, Edward. Orientalism. (New York, Random House: 1994).

Schmidt, Ronald. "Introduction to Political Theory." Lecture for a class at the University
of Southern Maine, September 2004.

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 APPENDIX A: TERMS & FORMATTING
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
coarticulation The tendency of adjacent speech sounds to influence one another
towards change.

content word Words that convey semantic meaning that definitively impacts the
meaning of an utterance are content words.

descriptive The perspective in studying language that aims only to describe the
actual linguistic behavior of native speakers.

etymology The study of a word's origins in earlier dialects of a language or

from other languages.

expletive infixation The insertion of a curse or similar exclamation into the middle of a
stem, not impacting the grammar of the utterance.

generative The perspective that looks at language in terms of what humans

recognize as grammatical.

grammatical Permissible to a native speaker of the target language.

function Words that contribute primarily to grammar and not to the general
meaning of an utterance are function words.

infixation The process by which a language takes a morpheme or word and

inserts it into a root word for either grammatical or semantic
purposes.

metalanguage Language that is used to talk about language.

native competency Speakers who learn a language as their first and during early
childhood are assumed to have the best tacit understanding of what
is and is not grammatical in their language. If a speaker is not
judging their native language, their grammaticality judgments on
some things may not accurately reflect what the language does and
does not allow.

null hypothesis The no-difference hypothesis, which predicts that there is no

difference between the conditions in the experiment.

perception The process by which our brains filter and interpret the world.

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phonetics The branch of linguistics dealing with the physical production and
acoustic properties of speech. In spoken languages, this "speech
act" refers to the sounds a person makes. In reference to signed
languages, the term refers to the movements involved in the
components of a sign.

phonology The branch of linguistics dealing with the way sounds are
represented in and perceived by the mind.

prescriptive The perspective on language study that claims there are right and
wrong ways of speaking that ought to be regulated and taught,
rather than taking the view that the study of language ought to
reflect how language is actually used.

psycholinguistics The branch of linguistics dealing with the way the mind processes
and produces language.

reanalysis The process by which word boundaries are redefined by the

shifting of a word-final or word-initial sound in the middle of a
commonly used phrase to, respectively, the word-initial or word-
final sound of the neighboring word.

semantics The branch of linguistics dealing with the meaning of words and
sentences.

FORMATTING

>Angle brackets indicate language change and direction thereof.

*Asterisks preceding a word indicate a non-grammatical construction.
Bold indicates a word that can be found in the Glossary.
/Bracketing forward slashes/ indicate phonological representation.
Italics indicate a word or phrase as it appears in the language.
"Quotation marks" indicate meaning or specific utterance.

- 85 -
 APPENDIX B: CORPORA RESULTS
Corpus 1 was a sampling of 10,000 words taken from chatrooms and listservs on topics
in literature, politics, music, television, technology, and religion.

Corpus 2 was a sampling of 10,000 words taken from blogs and news feeds on the same
topics.

CORPUS 1: NOTHER (1)

1. Taking Ford vs. Chevy to a whole nother level

CORPUS 2: NOTHER (1)

1. A whole 'nother kind of political action

CORPUS 1: OTHER (8)

1. other words: we tag them appropriately
2. Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age' is not dealt with in HoMe, other
than its mention in the Foreword
3. pulled from different sources (PD) other than David Shepard's work
4. MY MUSIC GOOD!! OTHER MUSIC BAD!
5. There are other bases for distinguishing countries, other reasons why they
come into systemic conflict
6. I had been thinking about this very question the other night
7. TV psychics trying to make sense of what i'm hearing from the "other side"

CORPUS 2: OTHER (4)

1. while those things can help get you started, other things come into play in
writing efficient programs
2. despite the financial and other hardships that many of our personnel face
3. producing an intense burst of gamma rays and other radiation
4. my experiments aren't working and exercise that "other" side of my brain

- 86 -
CORPUS 1: ANOTHER (14)
1. It might be interesting to add another feature
2. Yet Another "Test of Ubernyms"
3. are you using another acronym plugin?
4. im wondering if theres another waythanks!
5. it seems to not work when another wp plugin is activated,
6. this knob winds a spring that turns a gear that rotates another gear and then...
7. Then top the torrone with another sheet of wafer.
8. By coincidence (another one),
9. However, I will have another look at Vol. 6-8 to make sure.
10. the copyright is effectively extended for another 100 years (or so).
11. (it was another 6 years)
12. Missed seeing Johnny Cash because my parents had yet another argument that
ended in us kids leaving the house for a few days.
13. Then another 500 days were given.
14. Or is that yet another question that will be answered only when Jesus comes
back to earth

CORPUS 2: ANOTHER (15)

1. employed by politicians to use another's emotionally-based and reactionary
criticism advantageously.
2. The bartender finally returned and gave me another choice.
3. I figure another few years and I might have it perfected.
4. another incident that almost was,
5. for another countdown in Cape Canaveral, Fla., meeting with NASA officials
and following the launch minute-by-minute.
6. Our maximum experience on another planet to this point has been
7. The weatherman says expect another 10 inches of this shit tonight
8. It's yet another excellent DVD presentation from the
9. And, if the CDC doesn't lick the whole 'zombies are contagious' thing, there is
another option.
10. Tenet simply joins Colin Powell as another guy we thought we could trust
11. I'm always happy to have another volunteer, but I had to wonder why he
12. This week, San Francisco is entering another one of those "heatwaves" as the
newspaper calls them.
13. In another instance of censorship against websites about anything anti-
establishment in China,
14. The news will probably generate another round of editorials like the ones
written a year ago
15. another uncommon tap off the list

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APPENDIX C: EXPERIMENT DOCUMENTATION
PART 1: TEST ITEMS.

Test Sentences (Condition 1/4):

1a. I was walking with my sister, who was talking excitedly about her job, when she
suddenly switched to a whole nother topic.

2a. There's a whole nother level of meaning to Harry Potter, beyond the fun story
line.

3a. I love eating mcintosh apples, but my mother recently discovered a whole nother
variety that is equally delicious.

4a. There's a whole nother dialogue between Plato and his students that always gets
overlooked in favor of the Republic.

5a. I love Tolkien as much as the next person, but there's a whole nother world of
fantasy that has just as much literary value.

6a. Jonathan's a great musician, but loves politics so much that I often forget there's a
whole nother side to his life.

7a. You have a whole nother perspective on the situation, which I respect, but can't
agree with.

8a. My aunt swears by ammonia, but a squeegee offers a whole nother system for
washing glass that is infinitely safer.

9a. Bush's politics are often compared unfavorably with Reagan's, ignoring the fact
that the economics of the eighties presented a whole nother situation.

10a. She's got a whole nother idea of how the world works, and it's entirely too cynical
to be called naïve.

11a. Children are often taught only one perspective in a historical confrontation, so
they never learn that, from the losing side, there's a whole nother way of seeing
things.

12a. Christian doctrine has governed western morality for long enough that many
people don't realize that eastern thought offers a whole nother ideology for
making ethical judgments.

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Distracter Sentences:

1. Whale-watching is a somewhat futile activity, unless you enjoy watching a lot of

people grow simultaneously disappointed.

2. For a steam radiator to work with the best efficiency, it's important to bleed the
excess water on a monthly basis.

3. Fluorescent lights were supposedly designed to create a more pleasant work

environment, but they gave June the worst headache.

4. Having scale-figures in an architectural model is an important part of helping the

viewer get a true sense of size and proportion.

5. Mr. Smith has two degrees from Ivy League schools, but he loves to brag most
about his knack for mastering old card tricks.

6. Molly couldn't believe that Ben preferred to use cheap ballpoints over the fine tip
and even stroke of a well-designed gel pen.

7. Pressing the snooze button over and over again is the most satisfying feeling,
especially when you didn't need to set the alarm to begin with.

8. I think a starry sky over the ocean is the loveliest thing in the world, but my dad
prefers the view from a mountain at dawn.

9. Macaroni and cheese is the only dish that might beat out Ramen Noodles for
popularity as college student survival food.

10. There's a story my grandmother tells about my mother that hasn't stopped
embarrassing her even twenty-seven years after it happened.

11. Studying in a coffee shop is a great way to concentrate, but I only stay long
enough to get anything done if I go with a friend.

12. If you have really high ceilings, hanging suspended track lighting can help create
a cozier ambiance.

13. I thought of telling you about the soccer game when we were talking about school
clubs, but it would have started a completely different conversation.

14. Some people can sit and study for eight hours at a time with only brief breaks, but
my brain starts to shut down after three.

15. Latin has six distinct noun cases, but only five of them are used often enough to
bother memorizing them in the paradigm.

- 89 -
16. Trees have a way of making the most industrial areas of town feel hospitable and
pleasant.

17. Foreign cars are great to drive, but the cost of repairs is a completely different
story.

18. The Supreme Court is responsible for the legal interpretation of the Constitution,
but their decisions may be entirely inconsistent with the intentions of the founding
fathers.

19. Alternating Current, known as AC, is the power you use at home, which is much
easier to produce in large quantities than Direct Current, which batteries produce.

20. Some critics say that Jackson Pollock's work is a childlike sham, but Matt sees in
it both profound depth of feeling and excellence of design.

21. Interior brick walls give a place an old style, industrial feel that is considered very
hip, but the do little to keep out the cold.

22. Making bread is an art form with a science behind it that takes practice to master,
but one that is far more popular than the slightly different science of bagel
making.

23. Tumbledown Mountain is not one of the hardest mountains in New England, but
hikers should be prepared for slippery rocks, narrow passages, and tricky footing.

24. Autumn is a popular season for a Sunday drive, so if you need to be somewhere at
a certain in time, be sure to plan for slow-moving leaf-peepers.

25. High fructose corn syrup is a primary ingredient in so many juices, soft drinks,
and energy drinks, that water is always the healthiest choice in a restaurant.

26. Underage drinking is a serious problem in many universities not only because it's
illegal, but also because younger students haven't been taught how to drink
responsibly.

27. Academic freedom is an ideal touted by professors as an irrevocable right, but the
difference between academic freedom and freedom of speech is rarely made clear.

28. Silk plants are much easier to keep alive than real plants if you have a brown
thumb, but they also tend to attract a great deal more dust.

29. George loves the thrill of hockey's constant action, but Ian thinks soccer offers the
same excitement with significantly less violence.

- 90 -
30. Many students have taken to carrying cell phones and never get landlines because
moving your phone line every time you move is an annoying process.

31. Augusta is the capitol city of Maine and, much like the state, has to struggle with
its economy to survive since most of the commerce happens on the coast.

32. Children are taught to cut things using scissors, but if there were a safe way to
teach them use of an exacto-knife, they might find geometry useful much sooner.

33. T.V. stations and newspapers have recently been accused of being biased for one
party or another, but public radio remains a respectable source of news.

34. Beethoven was deaf, which both justifies the bombastic nature of much of his
music and makes his accomplishments that much more amazing.

35. The paradox of the liar is an ancient logical conundrum with broad relevance in
modern studies, including the idea of metalanguage in semantics.

36. The biggest problem with committees is that individual members are often
unwilling to put aside their interests for the sake of resolving a question.

- 91 -
 PART 2: CONSENT FORM

Research Study in Linguistics

You are about to be asked to participate in a research study in linguistics. You were
selected as a possible participant because you are an adult who is a speaker of English.
We ask that you read this form and ask any questions that you may have before agreeing
to be in the study.

The purpose of this study is to explore a linguistic construct in English. While discussing
the exact nature of this construction before the study would change the outcome, you will
be given a detailed description of the study and the results when the study is finished.
Participants in this study are USM students. The total number of subject is expected to be
45.

If you agree to be in this study, we would ask you to listen to 48 sentences and repeat
each one into a microphone that is recording your response. It will take you about half an
hour to complete this task, which we ask you to do only once.

There are no foreseeable risks or discomforts associated with this study.

There are no direct benefits associated with this study.

If you are in Dana McDaniel's LIN185J course, participation in this study will fulfill your
research study requirement. If you do not wish to participate in this study, Professor
McDaniel offers other ways for you to earn the class credit.

The records of this study will be kept private. Participants will be assigned a random
number and this number will be used to identify the data generated from their participant.
All files will be kept on a password protected computer accessible only to the primary
researcher, Melissa St.Germain, and her advisor, Dana McDaniel. The Institutional
Review Board may, however, be granted access to review the research records. All files
will be destroyed after three years. In any report we publish, we will not include any
information that will make it possible to identify a participant.

Your participation is voluntary. If you choose not to participate, it will not affect you
current or future relations with the University. You are free to withdraw at any time, for
whatever reasons.

The researchers conducting this study are Melissa St.Germain (Primary Investigator) and
Dana McDaniel (Co-Primary Investigator). For questions or more information concerning
this research you may contact them at 207.780.4582 or melissa.stgermain@maine.edu.

If you have any questions about your rights as a research subject, you may contact:
Director, Office of Research Compliance, USM at (207)780-4517, or
usmirb@usm.maine.edu, or TTY (207)780-5646.

- 92 -
You will be given a copy of this consent form and one will be kept in our records file for
future reference.

Statement of Consent

I have read (or have had read to me) the contents of this consent form and have been
encouraged to ask questions. I have received answers to my questions. I give my consent
to participate in this study. I have received (or will receive) a copy of this form.

Study Participant (Print Name): _____________________________

Participant or Legal Representative (Signature): _______________________ Date _____

Witness/Auditor (Signature): ______________________________________ Date _____

- 93 -
 APPENDIX D: DATA TABLE
For those of you who love analyzing data tables and would like a more comprehensive
look at the numbers this experiment turned up, here's a more complete representation of
the data:

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