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Dr Cynthia Allen

 

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.

 

Selected Publications:

Books:

1980. Topics in Diachronic English Syntax. New York: Garland Publishing.
1995. Case-Marking and Reanalysis: Grammatical Relations from Old to Early Modern English.. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Selected Articles and Papers:

1980. "Movement and Deletion in Old English," Linguistic Inquiry 11:2, pp. 261-323.

1986. "Reconsidering the History of Like," Journal of Linguistics 22, pp. 375-409.

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. Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers.

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. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 3-20.

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.

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. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 23-41.

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.

2002. “Case and Middle English Genitive Noun Phrases”. In Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change. David Lightfoot, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 57-80.

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.

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.

2005. “English: Old English.” In The Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics, 2nd edition, edited by Keith Brown. pp. 181-184. Oxford: Elsevier.

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. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 223-249.

2006. 'Case Syncretism and Word Order Change', in Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (eds) Handbook of the History of English. Oxford: Blackwell, 201-223.

2006. 'Possessives and Determiners in Old English', in Terttu Nevalainen, Juhani Klemola and Mikko Laitenen (eds) Types of Variation: Diachronic, Dialectal and Typological Interfaces. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 149-170.

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.

 

Forthcoming:

Allen, Cynthia (To appear in 2008). Genitive Case in Early English: Typology and Evidence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.