Here at SpecGram we make sure we make time to make some space to make reading things happen. Mostly linguistics-related things but, to be honest, comics, wiki pages, online news items, texts from friends, and movie reviews do also on occasion get read. Oh, and that instruction manual for how to work the vacuum cleaner on the fourth floor that absolutely no-one can figure out. And there’s the guy at the desk by the window who just reads a Breton dictionary all day. Anyway, we read stuff; that’s the point.

Over the years, we’ve developed a keenly honed skill set in reading linguistics stuff. We’ve learned, for example, that linguistics texts are about different things. For example, some linguistics stuff is about sound shifts in Proto-Germanic and other stuff is about computational approaches to text analysis. They are two of the main topics in linguistics writing, but there are others too. We’ve also noticed, critically (and in both senses of that term), that some texts on (and in all 27 senses of that term) linguistics make explicit reference to other texts, almost as if they were, in some way, building on, replying, responding to, or aligning with work that’s been done before. This incredible network of meaning relations that holds between different texts in linguistics is really what makes our discipline scientific, as this “referencing” element of writing, as far as we know, rarely if ever happens in other disciplines.

Anyway, given the expertise we’ve been building, we thought we might share a few of the insights we’ve been getting on with getting into getting together. So, in this inaugural edition of The SpecGram Handbook of Intertextuality and Textuality (SHoIT(iLL))—and believe me, there’s much more SHoIT(iLL) to come from the crew behind SpecGram—we thought we’d collect together a few of the ways in which linguistics text can be handled by their editors. It turns out there are a number of significant editorial moves that can be made. Editors of linguistics texts might, for example, send emails to enable conversation with potential contributors of linguistics texts. Alternatively, they might band together in small groups known as “boards” to facilitate the management of larger scale textual enterprises. Linguistics editors might, furthermore, request the delivery of a medium latte from their secretary using forms of words such as “Dan, pop over to Cool Coffee Company on the corner of 49th Street and grab me a latte; I’m as parched as the Nevada desert over here.”^* However, when it comes to texts themselves, linguistics editors can undertake a whole range of moves: asking for amendments, suggest changes, advising modification, and even requesting that a text be rewritten in part. They can even retract texts, which is what some of our exemplary excerpts below concern.

So that’s what we’ve been up to. We hope you enjoy the list, and should it inspire any of you to pursue a career as an editor of linguistics texts—opportunities are copious—we’d consider our hard work to have been a success!

• An influential paper on taboo language has been retracted. Apparently, it’s unrepeatable.
• A paper on reduplication has been found to be wholly or partly copied from earlier work.
• An analysis of the Voynich Manuscript has been retracted because it made even less sense.
• A new UG module on oxymorons has been cancelled after students found it difficult to follow, almost impossible to interpret and, for some, meaningless.
• A paper on treiglad meddal has been softened up for publication.
• A recent PhD on Cornish has been entirely re-written.
• Another PhD on Cornish has had to be reconstructed after the original submission was lost.
• A weighty tome on the Anglo-Saxon victories at the battles of Catraeth, Chester, and Deorham, written from a Brittonic point of view, has just been retracted retreated.
• A tome on deixis has been found here today.
• A paper on generative language models has been retracted just after the cat jumped down from my shoulder.
• We’re still waiting for that paper on Vladimir and Estragon.
• A new book on the philosophy of language has got everyone asking questions.
• A monograph on dialect differences across the four Farthings of the Shire have been found in a hole.
• A book on the choruses of sea shanties has just been repeated. Endlessly.
• A paper on the Welsh-speaking communities of the Galapagos Islands appears not to exist.
• A paper on pre-nasalisation has got up everyone’s nose.
• A research paper on Cumbric has been lost in the north west of England (although a few remnants of it have later turned up).
• The entire history of Linguistic Inquiry has been retracted because the journal was never advanced.
• A presentation on Volapük has been accused of somehow achieving a balance between being both gratuitously over-complex on the one hand and completely useless on the other.
• A new book on tautology is generally seen as longer than necessary.
• A paper on the etymologies of Edinburgh, Knaresborough and Middlesbrough contains numerous misspellings.
• Another paper on the position of the tongue root in pharyngealised vowels has been retracted. The original reviewers were thought lax.
• An analysis of the literary merit of the poems of Deedles D’Dee has been very poorly received.
• A new analysis of the character of Gloucester in King Lear has fallen off a cliff.
• A paper on the phonetics of tap consonants has got everyone in a constant flap.
• A report on the FBI’s plans to manipulate language as a tool of mind control was [REDACTED].
• Revisions have been requested for a paper on treiglad llais as it contains too much authorial voice.
• Two papers on the deaths of Romeo and Juliet in Romeo and Juliet are completely at odds with each other.
• There’s a new book out on meter which just can’t be beat.
• It seems that a recent article on the content of SpecGram has been entirely made up.
• A paper on the IPA notation for retraction has finally had a line drawn under it.
• A paper on child language acquisition has had the wug pulled from under it.
• A paper on the role of pairs of binary values expressed in two-by-two grid form in linguistics has just been squared away.
• Intellectual property rights of a recent book on the Shakespeare authorship controversy have just been claimed by the Earl of Oxford.
• The editors of a book on h-epenthesis in modern Cymraeg have just decided on some radical insertions.
• Several books on the Elvish languages of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien have completely disappeared. One librarian suggested that it’s almost as if they were packed into magical boats which sailed into the sunset across some quasi-physical heavenly pathway before arriving in an extra-terrestrial Divine Realm. We-ird.
• An analysis of the character of Perdita in A Winter’s Tale has completely disappeared. (It may surface in about 16 years’ time.)
• A paper on the return of the tongue to inside the mouth has also been retracted.
• A paper on the life cycle of languages has just been rounded off.
• A monograph on Esperanto appears to have been almost wholly made up.
• A long monograph on long monophthongs has been labelled as boooooooooooooooring.
• A book on the language of defunct Acts of Parliament has just been repealed.
• A PhD submission on morphology was recently failed. Examiners unanimously agreed that it was the smallest possible unit of meaning that they had seen for years.
• A paper on syncope was retracted because it was missing several pages in the middle.

Finally, as a hint of an antidote to the somewhat negative tone of those above, we have one final example:

• A paper on vowel harmony in Ateso was given advance publication.