About

Troy Messick is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the Department of Linguistics at Rutgers University. His research interests include syntax, morphology, pronouns, agreement, and ellipsis. He is involved in various research groups such as the Morphology Reading Group, Phonology and Phonetics Research Group (PhonX), Semantics, and Syntactic Theory @ Rutgers (ST@R). He is dedicated to teaching and mentoring students in the field of linguistics, contributing to the academic community through his research and leadership within the department.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Philosophy
• Linguistics
• Natural Language Processing
• Psychology
• Mathematics
• Physics
• Statistics
• History
• Cognitive science

Selected publications

• On case-copying reflexives

  Natural Language & Linguistic Theory · 2025-01-17

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract While it is well-known that local anaphors match their antecedents in ϕ -features in many languages, it has been suggested that the form of anaphors is insensitive to the morphological case of their antecedent. We show that this is not the case for local complex reflexives (and reciprocals) in Telugu. Pieces of these elements must match in case features with their antecedents. We provide the first in-depth description and analysis of this type of reflexive. Our analysis bears on the structure of complex anaphors, the relation between anaphors and intensifiers in some languages, and the syntactic mechanisms that allow feature sharing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• 3/4 of a Monster: On Mixed Shifty Agreement in Telugu

  Linguistic Inquiry · 2023 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Artificial Intelligence

  Within the typology of embedded pronouns, there are languages that allow for non–first person pronouns to apparently control first person agreement morphology when in certain embedded contexts. This type of agreement displays some degree of optionality: it is also possible for the pronoun to control the expected agreement morphology given the pronoun’s own overt morphological features. This squib provides new data from the Dravidian language Telugu showing that when the embedded pronoun controls agreement on two separate targets, agreement may be uniform across the two targets or the two targets can mismatch in one direction, but crucially not the other. I show how this paradigm can be accounted for using the assumptions that the pronouns in question are similar to so-called hybrid nouns and that agreement features are restricted in principled ways.

  PublisherDOI

• E-Raising Reconsidered: Constituency, Coordination, and Case-Matching Reciprocals

  Linguistic Inquiry · 2023-07-26 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In Icelandic, part of the complex reciprocal hvor annar matches in case with the reciprocal’s antecedent. In structures where the reciprocal is embedded in a PP, the preposition intervenes between the two parts. A recent analysis of these data suggests that part of the reciprocal overtly moves to the base position of the antecedent by an operation termed e-raising. We show that such an analysis makes a number of wrong predictions about the constituencies of such structures and also about the behavior of reciprocals in coordination. We show that this is also the case for other languages that display case-agreeing reciprocals. We instead argue that matching in case between antecedent and reciprocal can occur with the reciprocal staying in situ. Instances with PPs do involve movement but only to the edge of PP and no farther. This analysis is in line with a number of recent approaches that advocate for a morphosyntactic feature-matching relation between antecedent and locally bound anaphors.

  PublisherDOI

• Hybrid agreement with English quantifier partitives

  Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2023-10-09 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This paper presents a novel case study of a 3/4 agreement pattern typically found with hybrid nouns. This case study involves agreement and binding with Quantified NPs in English. I propose an analysis that relies on different classes of agreement targets agreeing at different times and couple this with a condition on the access to semantic agreement features. This new analysis can account for the novel data presented here as well as the data from the literature. This paper hence broadens both our empirical knowledge of 3/4 patterns as well as refines our theory of features and agreement that underlie such patterns.

  PublisherDOI

• On apparent pronominal feature contradictions: Shifty agreement in Telugu

  Syntax · 2023-02-23 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article investigates so‐called monstrous agreement—where a non‐first‐person pronoun can control first‐person agreement on an embedded verb—in Telugu. Empirically, I provide the most in‐depth description of monstrous agreement in Telugu to date. To account for monstrous agreement, I propose that embedded pronouns have morphosyntactic features that indicate their roles in both the matrix and embedded speech acts. This means an embedded pronoun can have first‐person and third‐ or second‐person features simultaneously. I then propose a precise set of morphosyntactic operations that allow the first‐person feature to appear on the verbal agreement but not the pronoun controlling the agreement. I also show that pronouns that have these contradictory features must be bound by an operator to be licensed, and I discuss the nature of these operators and the locality conditions on the binding relationship. The theoretical consequence of this article is that apparently contradictory feature combinations on pronominal elements must be sanctioned by UG.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gender asymmetries in ellipsis: An experimental comparison of markedness and frequency accounts in English

  Journal of Linguistics · 2021 · 11 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Linguistics

  Bobaljik & Zocca (2011) argue that ellipsis reveals the existence of (at least) two classes of gender-paired nouns: in the actor / actress class, the grammatically feminine form is specified for conceptual gender, while the unaffixed form is unspecified, exemplifying the classic markedness asymmetry (Jakobson 1932); in the prince / princess class, both forms are specified for conceptual gender. Here we test two theories of this asymmetry: one that encodes markedness in the linguistic representation (e.g. Merchant 2014, Sudo & Spathas 2016, and Saab 2019), and one that traces the asymmetry to differences in the relative frequency of the forms in each pair (Haspelmath 2006). The frequency approach predicts that the size of the asymmetries (as quantified by acceptability judgments) will correlate with the size of the relative frequency ratio for each pair. We test this prediction in two experiments: the first is a curated set of 16 pairs in English, and the second is a test of 58 pairs that nearly exhausts such pairs in English. We use frequencies from COCA (Davies 2008) to test the prediction of the frequency approach. Our results suggest that the relative frequency hypothesis is not an empirically adequate competitor for the explanation of gender asymmetries.

  PublisherDOI

• The size of things I

  2021

  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Computer Science

  This book focuses on the role size plays in grammar. Under the umbrella term size fall the size of syntactic projections, the size of feature content, and the size of reference sets. The contributions in this first volume discuss size and structure building. The most productive research program in syntax where size plays a central role revolves around clausal complements. Part 1 of Volume I contributes to this program with papers that argue for particular structures of clausal complements, as well as papers that employ sizes of clausal complements to account for other phenomena. The papers in Part 2 of this volume explore the interaction between size and structure building beyond clausal complements, including phenomena in CP, vP, and NP domains. The contributions cover a variety of languages, many of which are understudied. The book is complemented by Volume II which discusses size effects in movement, agreement, and interpretation.

  Publisher

• The derivation of highest subject questions and the nature of the EPP

  Glossa a journal of general linguistics · 2020 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  This squib argues that matrix subject wh-phrases reside in SpecCP and moreover during the course of the derivation, never move to SpecTP. This observation raises an immediate problem for languages with a strong EPP requirement on T, such as English. I argue that Chomsky (2013)’s approach to EPP effects (and other similar approaches) predict the observed pattern, while other prominent theories of the EPP fail to account for it.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On a Nonargument for Cleft Sources in Sluicing

  Linguistic Inquiry · 2020-05-06 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  On the basis of certain semantic intuitions, Barros (2012) argues that ellipsis does not require structural isomorphism between elided structure and its antecedent. We tackle this claim. Semantic intuitions cannot be a pointer to the analysis of silent structure. We provide empirical evidence that raises the question of to what extent semantic intuitions about plausible articulable syntax must inform one’s analysis of silent structure. We conclude that the answer to this question must be crosslinguistically informed. We conjecture that ellipsis introduces ellipsis-specific interpretive mechanisms, so that intuitions about “how the unelided structure would be interpreted” are not empirically relevant.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Derivational Economy in Syntax and Semantics

  Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics · 2017-02-28 · 7 citations

  reference-entrySenior author

  Economy considerations have always played an important role in the generative theory of grammar. They are particularly prominent in the most recent instantiation of this approach, the Minimalist Program, which explores the possibility that Universal Grammar is an optimal way of satisfying requirements that are imposed on the language faculty by the external systems that interface with the language faculty which is also characterized by optimal, computationally efficient design. In this respect, the operations of the computational system that produce linguistic expressions must be optimal in that they must satisfy general considerations of simplicity and efficient design. Simply put, the guiding principles here are (a) do something only if you need to and (b) if you do need to, do it in the most economical/efficient way. These considerations ban superfluous steps in derivations and superfluous symbols in representations. Under economy guidelines, movement takes place only when there is a need for it (with both syntactic and semantic considerations playing a role here), and when it does take place, it takes place in the most economical way: it is as short as possible and carries as little material as possible. Furthermore, economy is evaluated locally, on the basis of immediately available structure. The locality of syntactic dependencies is also enforced by minimal search and by limiting the number of syntactic objects and the amount of structure accessible in the derivation. This is achieved by transferring parts of syntactic structure to the interfaces during the derivation, the transferred parts not being accessible for further syntactic operations.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Andrés Saab

  Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas

  3 shared

• Jonathan David Bobaljik

  2 shared

• Neda Todorović

  University of British Columbia

  1 shared

• Jon Sprouse

  New York University Abu Dhabi

  1 shared

• Asya Pereltsvaig

  1 shared

• Leo Bobaljik Wurmbrand

  1 shared

• Masahiko Takahashi

  Yamagata University Hospital

  1 shared

• Caroline Pajančič

  1 shared

Education

• Ph.D, Linguistics

  University of Connecticut

  2017

• B.A., Linguistics

  University of Michigan

  2011