Breaking the Fourth Wall and the Fourth Voice
A Letter from the Managing Editor
Well, we don’t actually speak that much Finnish or Estonian around these parts, so we don’t really get a lot of fourth voice action, but boy howdy we do love breaking that fourth wall. Did you notice, Dear Reader? Huh? Didja?
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Sandro Nielsen, 2013, “The Future of Dictionaries, Dictionaries of the Future”, in The Bloomsbury Companion To Lexicography, Bloomsbury Publishing.
Chiasmus of the Month
January 2014
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Getting back to the use and abuse of voices specifically, and syntax in general, this month’s issue of SpecGram features a wonderful article that continues a long—if somewhat tenuous and admittedly sparse—tradition, comprising the following:
- An excellent article on the passive voice was written by Joel Boyd. (Ps.Q. XVI.2, 1989)
- Claude Searsplainpockets wrote-wrote-wrote with astounding eloquence (yeah! yeah! yeah!) about the hyp-hyp-hyperactive voice. (SpecGram CXLVII.4, 1993)
- Yreka Bakery an article a stunning speech disorder center embedding was caused by described wrote. (SpecGram CLI.2, 2006)
- He is Edmundly, C.ly, Gladstone-Chamberlainly; he exists authorly to it; it exists articlely; it exists movingly; it exists adverbially. (SpecGram CLII.γ, 2006)
- An article about center-embedded passives by Küçük Kaynaranyak Küçük wrote by Küçük Kaynaranyak Küçük about center-embedded passives an article. (SpecGram CLIII.4, 2008)
And now in this issue, an article on middle voice writes interestingly for Babylon J. Middleton! (N.B.: This article should not confuse with the middle finger for alert readers.)
By the way, this article itself serves an additional diagnostic purpose: if you made it through all of the above without your eyes glazing over and without losing consciousness (oh, a warning—you should be seated while reading this article: we lost two interns to head trauma after they passed out while reading it standing up, and now the Sociolinguistics and Descriptive Linguistics departments are in mourning), then you might consider a lucrative productive instructive obstructive inductive “interesting” career as a syntactician. Succeed you will!
