{"id":75022,"date":"2013-04-02T09:32:38","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T13:32:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/?p=75022"},"modified":"2013-04-08T10:43:19","modified_gmt":"2013-04-08T14:43:19","slug":"linguistics-students-earn-national-honors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/2013\/04\/linguistics-students-earn-national-honors\/","title":{"rendered":"Linguistics Students Earn National Honors"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Linguistics<\/a>
Linguistics graduate students Troy Messick, left, and Peter Smith have received awards from the Linguistic Society of America. (Peter Morenus\/UConn Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Graduate student Troy Messick of the Department of Linguistics has been selected as the 2013 Bloch Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America<\/a> (LSA). The award is the most prestigious honor the national society gives to graduate students.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s hard to overstate the prestige of this award,\u201d says department head Jonathan Bobaljik. \u201cTroy will be representing all of the graduate students in the society, nationwide.\u201d<\/p>\n

As the Bloch fellow, Messick, a second-year Ph.D. student working with Professor \u017deljko Bo\u0161kovi\u0107, will serve on the LSA\u2019s executive committee as a voting member and lead the student section of the society. He will also receive funding to attend the 2013 LSA Linguistic Institute, a four-week series of lectures and workshops held every two years and taught by linguistics faculty from around the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the institute, students get exposed to areas of linguistics they aren\u2019t exposed to in their home departments,\u201d says Bobaljik. \u201cThey get a different perspective on the topics they\u2019re working on and have incredible opportunities to network with faculty and other students.\u201d<\/p>\n

A graduate of the University of Michigan, Messick studies syntax, or how sentences are constructed across languages. He says that for him, much of the draw of linguistics is its mystery.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see linguistics as a puzzle,\u201d he says. \u201cYou have a set of data and you want to see generalizations in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Theoretical linguists want to know what\u2019s acceptable and unacceptable in different languages, he explains.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t wear lab coats,\u201d he jokes, \u201cbut we do experiments and get really interesting results.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his work, Messick studies ellipsis, which in linguistics is the omission of words from a sentence while retaining the sentence\u2019s original meaning. For example, in the sentence \u2018John can play an instrument, but I forget which instrument he plays,\u2019 the last part can be \u2013 and often is \u2013 dropped: \u2018John can play an instrument, but I forget which.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you do this, the person who\u2019s hearing the sentence needs to be able to recover the missing words,\u201d explains Messick. \u201cSo it has to be clear enough in the sentence, even without those words.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peter Smith, a third-year Ph.D. student of associate professor Susanne Wurmbrand, also received an LSA fellowship to attend the institute, to be held in June at the University of Michigan.<\/p>\n

A graduate of University College London, Smith came to UConn to work with Wurmbrand and Bobaljik on syntax and morphology, the study of the structure of words. He studies a phenomenon that linguists used to think was impossible: taking a certain type of word, called a clitic, and inserting it in the middle of another word to change that word\u2019s role in a sentence.<\/p>\n

There are only a few languages in which this happens, says Smith; one example is Udi<\/a>, an endangered language<\/a> spoken in Azerbaijan and its surrounding Caucasus region. But he wonders if there may be more.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe goal of linguistics is to explain the patterns we see in languages as simply as possible,\u201d Smith says. \u201cIf we find something different in one of the 6,000 languages out there, it\u2019s worth looking at.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two graduate students have received awards from the Linguistic Society of America, including the top honor, the Bloch Fellowship, given to Troy Messick.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":75051,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[63],"class_list":["post-75022","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-18 04:32:51","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75022","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75022"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75022\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":75425,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75022\/revisions\/75425"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/75051"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75022"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75022"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75022"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=75022"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=75022"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}