The first two chapters of Metamagical Themas are on the topic of self-referential sentences. These chapters had a very nostalgic feel for me, reminding me of a much younger version of myself, somehow. I have the feeling that 15-year-old Ted would have found this sort of thing really inspiring, but to 31-year-old me it feels a little juvenile. Maybe I’m a little less interested in this kind of abstraction these days. That language can be twisted into a self-referencing pretzel doesn’t surprise me the way it would have when I was younger. There’s still a little frisson for me in the Epimenides Paradox, but stepping back, self-reference doesn’t have the same thrill it used to.

From a cognitive perspective, I’d have to divide self-referencing sentences into two categories: those which are in some sense about themselves (mostly containing the phrase “this sentence”, and those which require the hypothesis of the sentence-as-its-own-author. Consider the difference between “This sentence has five words.” and “I have four words.” The former seems less cognitively complex than the latter, mainly because understanding “I” as referring to the sentence itself, rather than the author of the sentence, requires a big conceptual leap. Imagining both sentences spoken aloud, and the problem is thrown into even sharper relief. It’s hard to picture someone understanding the spoken sentence “I am the meaning of this sentence,” in the same way as when they encounter it on the page.

Thinking about it a little more, I’m not sure I’m on board with describing a sentence as self-referential in the first place. Looking back on my two or three undergraduate courses in linguistics, I seem to remember that reference is something only speakers can do. So, it’s more correct to say that the speaker is referencing the sentence than to say that the sentence is referencing itself. This falls into an area of pragmatics (which is a linguistics class I really wanted to take in undergrad, but didn’t). There’s this thing called deixis, which is when the meaning of some words in an utterance requires contextual information. For instance, understanding “I’m sick of living here, because I can’t get decent Thai food” requires some context, allowing you to fill in that “here” refers to Ann Arbor. When the referent of an expression is itself part of the discourse, the situation is called discourse deixis, and when the deictic expression refers to the expression or speech act in which it occurs, it’s called token-reflexive discourse deixis. So something like “This sentence is true” is an example of token-reflexive discourse deixis, and now that it’s got a name, it doesn’t seem so mysterious, does it? There is something a little mysterious going on in “this sentence”, in that it’s both definite and somewhat deictic.

But, there’s not a lot that’s linguistically or psychologically interesting about “When you’re not looking at it, this sentence is in Spanish.” other than the impossibility. We do stuff like this all the time in real life. I’ll say something like, “You were really drunk last weekend! You were walking around like this, and your voice sounded crazy like this!” And I’ll do it in a high-pitched squeal while shambling around like a zombie.

Alternatively, the sentence “When you’re not reading me, I’m written in Spanish.” is much more interesting, since it’s something that doesn’t work as an actual utterance. We’re required to imagine the sentence as its own speaker in order to make it intelligible. When you use “I”, you using what linguists might call person deixis (referring to a person in context), but here “I” isn’t a person, it’s the discourse. Are we imagining the sentence as a person talking, or are we just substituting “this sentence” for “I” when we read it? Reading academic papers, you’ll see stuff like “This paper will attempt to explain the difference between Etruscan and Roman bathing practices,” and you won’t have any trouble figuring out that “this paper” isn’t attempting to do anything itself – the author of “this paper” is attempting to avoid the first-person pronoun.