Grammar Girl here, last week in part one we learned about cool linguistic stuff such as

morphemes and affixes.

And decided that the way whole is splitting up another, and a whole other, looks a lot

like loose definitions of tomises or infixing.

But in fact, it's not those things.

It turns out that what matters here is the history and status of the word another.

Merian Webster says another is an adjective, but linguists make a finer distinction than

traditional grammar does.

In that some adjectives, the ones that aren't very content-full and are instead more functional

are given the more specific label, determiner.

Determiner's introduced nouns and include articles like the, and possessive adjectives

like my.

But they do not describe nouns the way true, content adjectives do, think of adjectives

such as green or nice.

Nouns are content words too, rich with semantic meanings such as apple or sunset, whereas

prepositions are function words in that prepositions like, of, are extremely difficult to define.

So another is certainly a determiner.

It introduces nouns as in another apple, but doesn't modify them like the true adjective

ripe in the ripe apple.

Next, what do we use another to express?

We could summarize it as indicating a second one or an additional one.

Notice that any context calling for a, that's a whole other thing, requires some original

...