Self-Referential Sentences

Upon the third repeat reading of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, I stumbled upon my favorite section, the one dealing with self-reference in language. Self-reference is used frequently in philosophy and programming, but I find the simplest, most interesting and certainly funniest examples occur when only language is considered (which many would argue is philosophy, but that's neither here nor there.)

Case in point:

A ceux qui ne comprennent pas l'anglais, la phrase citeé ci-dessous ne dit rien: "For those who know no French, the French sentence that introduced this quoted sentence has no meaning."

It actually works better if you only know English (Or French, but if you can't read English, what are you doing here?). The entire concept circles around the idea of a sentence that is somehow self-aware. Of course, this leads to some first-person pronoun confusion with sentences like

I am the subject of this sentence.

And

I am simultaneously writing and being written.

Or my favorite,

This inert sentence is my body, but my soul is alive, dancing in the sparks of your brain.

The first two raise questions regarding the nature of "I". What is "I"? The sentence? The English language? Me, the writer? The screen you're reading right now? On the other hand, the third sentence makes explicit the fact that "I" is the meaning of the sentence, and draws attention to the fact that the words on the screen are not necessarily the "sentence". After all, what is the sentence? The inert letters, or the idea you have when you read it? I will leave this as an exercise to the reader.

Of course, as with any medium, language has a fourth wall that is rarely breached.

Hey you there. Yeah you. Are you reading me or writing me?

And

Thit sentence is not self-referential, because "thit" is not a word.

I'll just go ahead and copy the other good ones. One of them is mine.

because I didn't think of a good beginning for it.

This sentence, though not interrogative, nevertheless ends in a question mark?

Sentence fragment.

This sentence no verb.

This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.

I'll leave you with a lovely short story written by David Moser, titled This Is The Title Of The Story, Which Is Also Found Several Times In The Story Itself.