Dr Cynthia Allen
Contact:
Position: Graduate Convenor (Linguistics), Reader (Linguistics)
Email: cynthia.allen@anu.edu.au
Phone: 6125 4131
Location: Baldessin Precinct Building, Room W2.27
Research interests:
Dr Cynthia Allen is a Reader in the Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Program, School of Language Studies, Arts and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is the Director of ANU's Centre for Research on Language Change She contributes the Middle English syntax, style, and pragmatics records for the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies. Her specialty is the history of English syntax and her research interests also include syntactic theory generally. She is currently investigating the history of adnominal possessive constructions in English and other Germanic languages.
Cynthia runs an Anglo-Saxon reading group on Thursdays during Term time.
Selected publications:
Books:
2008. Genitive Case in Early English: Typology and Evidence.
1995. Case-Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Modern English..
1980. Topics in Diachronic English Syntax.
Selected Articles and Papers:
2010. “Substantival Adjectives in the History of English and the Nature of Syntactic Change”, in Rachel Hendery and Jennifer Hendriks (eds) Grammatical Change: Theory and Description.
2009. “On the Disappearance of Genitive Types in Middle English: Objective Genitives with Nouns of Love and Dread and the Nature of Syntactic Change', in Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupuis and Etleva Vocaj (eds) Selected Papers from 18th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 6–11 August 2007.
2007. 'Variation in the NP/DP in Old English: Determiner and Possessive Combinations', in Annie Zaenen, Jane Simpson, Tracy Holloway King, Jane Grimshaw, Joan Maling and Chris Manning (eds) Architectures, Rules, and Preferences: Variations on Themes by Joan W. Bresnan. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 3-20.
2007. “The Case of the Genitive in the
2006. 'Possessives and Determiners in Old English', in Terttu Nevalainen, Juhani Klemola and Mikko Laitenen (eds) Types of Variation: Diachronic, Dialectal and Typological Interfaces.
2006. 'Case Syncretism and Word Order Change', in Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds) Handbook of the History of English.
2005. “English: Old English.” In The Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics, 2nd edition, edited by Keith Brown. pp. 181-184.
2005. “Changes in Case Marking in NP: From Old English to Middle English.” In Competition and Variation in Natural languages: The Case for Case, edited by Mengistu Amberber & Helen de Hoop.
2004. “These Our Letters: The Dem Poss Construction from Old to Early Modern English.” In An International Master of Syntax and Semantics. Papers Presented to Aimo Seppänen on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday, edited by Gunnar Bergh, Jennifer Herriman & Mats Mobärg. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 11-19.
2003. “The Development of 'Strengthened’ Possessive Pronouns in English”. Language Sciences 24 . 189-211.
"Deflexion and the development of the genitive in English". English Language and Linguistics 7.1. 1-28.
2003. ‘The Early English ‘his Genitives´ from a Germanic Perspective. In Collins, Peter & Mengistu Amberber (eds.) (2003) Proceedings of the 2002 Conference of the Australian Linguistics Society. http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ling/als/als2kproceedings.shtml.
2002. “Case and Middle English Genitive Noun Phrases”. In Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change. David Lightfoot, ed.
2001. “The Development of a New Passive in English”. Time over Matter: Diachronic Perspectives on Morphosyntax. Miriam Butt and Tracy Holloway King, eds. Stanford: CSLI, 43-72.
2000. “On the development of a friend of mine.” In Fanego, T., M. J. López-Couso & J. Pérez-Guerra (eds.) English historical syntax and morphology, Selected papers from 11 ICEHL, Santiago de Compostela, 7-11 September 1998.
1997. "Middle English Case Loss and the `Creolization' Hypothesis", English Language and Linguistics 1.1, pp. 63-89.
1997. "The Origins of the `Group Genitive' in English," Transactions of the Philological Society 95:1, pp. 111-131.
1996. "A Change to Structural Case Marking in Early Middle English". In Studies in Comparative Germanic Syntax II, edited by Höskuldur Thráinsson, Samuel David Epstein, and Steve Peter.
1992. "Old English and the Syntactician: Some Remarks and a Syntactician's Guide to Editions of the Works of Ælfric". In Edinburgh Studies in the English Language Vol. 2, edited by Fran Colman. Pp. 1-19.
1986. "Reconsidering the History of Like," Journal of Linguistics 22, pp. 375-409.
1980. "Movement and Deletion in Old English," Linguistic Inquiry 11:2, pp. 261-323.
Forthcoming:
“The Poss(essive) Det(erminer) Construction in Early Middle English.” To appear in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Middle English , edited by Laura Wright and Richard Dance.
“Lexical Functional Grammar (Change in English in Theoretical Perspectives”, To appear in A. Bergs and L. J. Brinton (eds) Historical Linguistics of English: An International Handbook. Handbook of Linguistics and Communication Science
“Why a Determiner? The Possessive + Adjective + Determiner Construction in Old English”. To appear in Information Structure and Syntactic Change , edited by Mar ía José López-Couso, Bettelou Los and Anneli Meurman-Solin .
“Dealing with Postmodified Possessors in Early English:
