How to parse わけじゃなし


A novel I'm reading contains this snippet of dialogue. The manager of a love
hotel is explaining why she doesn't return to her apartment between shifts:

> 帰ったって何があるってわけじゃなし、誰が待っているわけじゃなし、ホテルの仮眠室で寝て、起きてそのまま仕事をすることの方が多い。

Does the わけじゃなし here parse to "わけ じゃ 無し", or is she dropping the ”い” in "わけ じゃ
ない し"? Just in case it might be relevant, she speaks very colloquially, and is
from the Yamagata countryside, although I can't detect any particular
regionalisms in her speech. The setting is Tokyo.

If it is "わけ じゃ 無し", how does it work grammatically?

{EDIT-ADDENDUM} For anyone who's interested, I asked a native speaker about
this, and his impression was that "わけじゃなし" adds an edge of scorn (「ばかにする」 is
the way he put it) that "わけじゃないし" doesn't have, but with the same meaning. He
also reckoned that it derives from "無し", although, personally, I still think
that's an open question. Where's an etymologist when you need one?




I asked a handy native speaker (Tokyo linguistic area) about this one and got
an interesting response. They had no comment on where exactly なし comes from,
but they perceived a specific difference between なし and ないし:

  * A ってわけじゃないし、 B ってわけじゃないし... = "For one thing, it's not A; for another, it's not B..." -- the しs signpost that it all adds up into a coherent whole, a multifaceted _argument_ if you like.
  * A ってわけじゃなし、 B ってわけじゃなし... = "It's not A, it's not B..." -- the two parts are separate; there is no "link" from A to B; it is a series of discrete assertions rather than a guided tour through an argument.

In a comment above Tsuyoshi says that わけじゃなし has the same meaning as わけじゃないし,
so this might just be my informant's idiolect (or Tsuyoshi's!), but I thought
I'd throw this up anyway, for interested parties.

