Given the widespread use of the “a whole nother” construction, one would expect ‘nother’ to show up in other constructions, but after much highly scientific introspection about my internal grammar, I was convinced, though puzzled, that it did in fact not work in other constructions.
I was talking with slowlane tonight, though, and she said, “He’s got a full nother week.” There it is–a perfectly sensible utterance. Where else does ‘nother’ already appear in the wild? How else shall ‘nother’ be used?
Googling ‘nother -whole’ doesn’t show much of interest, but buried in the hits of the surname Nother and “‘nother” at the beginning of a phrase, are “some nother stuff” and “some nother wierd things.” Furthermore, ‘”a * nother” -whole’ turns up “a hefty nother thing”, “a good nother 20 years”, “a totally nother context”, “a single nother person”, and “a couple nother questions”, among others.
Yes, and http://www.websters-online-dictionary.org helpfully points out that ‘nother’ appears in such words as “hypnotherapy” and i nothers like it.
And have you considered the “one a nothers”? William Tyndale in his “exposition of the fyrste Epistle of seynt Ihon” encourages us “Dearly beloued let vs loue one a nother.”
http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/anglica/Chronology/16thC/Tyndale/tyn_exj4.html
Well, I think that you are actually looking for a variant of ‘nuther’ I think this is what our estimed professor of American Dialectolgy calls ‘eye-dialect’
In some examples it seems to be that “another” takes infixes in the form of emphatic modifiers–a-full-nother, a-whole-nother–or specifiers–a-single-nother. If it’s an infix variation, that might explain why you don’t see it in other constructions.