Dr Cynthia Allen
Emerita Fellow, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics
ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
Areas of expertise
- Linguistic Structures (Incl. Grammar, Phonology, Lexicon, Semantics) 200408
- Language In Time And Space (Incl. Historical Linguistics, Dialectology) 200406
Biography
Dr Cynthia Allen was a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Linguistics and Applied Linguistics Program, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics in the College of Arts and Social Sciences until her retirement. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a former Director of ANU's Centre for Research on Language Change. Her specialty is the history of English syntax and her research interests also include syntactic theory generally. She serves on the editorial boards of the Oxford University Press series Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics and the Mouton series Studies in Language Change as well as the journal English Language and Linguistics. She is currently investigating the relationship between loss of case marking and history of adnominal possessive constructions in English and other Germanic languages as well as the disappearance of 'external' (dative) possessors in English and related matters including the development of the definite article in English. Her research has recently expanded to include the effects of contact with Norse and Celtic languages on the syntax and Old and Early Middle English.
Cynthia runs an Anglo-Saxon reading group weekly during term time.
Publications
- Allen, C 2021, 'Pronominally headed relative clauses in early English', English Language and Linguistics, vol. Online.
- Allen, C 2020, 'Case and preposition stranding in Old English free relatives', NOWELE : North-Western European Language Evolution, vol. 73, no. 2, pp. 185-211.
- Allen, C 2019, Dative External Possessors in Early English, Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom.
- Allen, C 2019, 'The Definite Article in Old English: Evidence from AElfric's Grammar', in Nuria Yanez-Bouza, Emma Moore, Linda van Bergen & Willem Hollmann (ed.), Categories, Constructions, and Change in English Syntax, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom, pp. 130-146.
- Allen, C 2017, 'Middle English', in Mark Aronoff (ed.), Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Oxford University Press, United Kingdom, pp. online.
- Allen, C 2017, 'Generative approaches', in Laurel J. Brinton (ed.), English Historical Linguistics: Approaches and Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, pp. 42-69.
- Allen, C 2016, 'How did that apostrophe get into that possessive?', in Agnieszka Uberman and Teodor Hrehovcik (ed.), Text - Sentence - Word: Studies in English Linguistics, Vol II, Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego, Poland, pp. 9-18.
- Allen, C 2016, 'Typological change: investigating loss of inflection in early English', in Merja Kytð¶ and Päivi Pahta (ed.), The Cambridge Handbook of English Historical Linguistics, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom, pp. 444-459.
- Allen, C 2016, 'Sifting through the evidence: principles and pitfalls', in Tim William Machan (ed.), Imagining Medieval English: Language Structures and Theories, 500-1500, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 166-187.
- Allen, C 2016, 'The definite determiner in Early Middle English: What happened with þe?', in Sten Vikner, Henrik Jörgensen and Elly van Gelderen (ed.), Let us have articles betwixt us: Papers in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Honour of Johanna L. Wood, Aarhus University, Denmark, pp. 43-82.
- Allen, C 2014, 'Old English and the Syntactician: Revisited', Studies in Medieval English Language and Literature, vol. 29, no. 2014, pp. 1-34.
- Allen, C 2013, 'Dealing with post-modified possessors in early English: Split and group genitives', in Kersti Borjars, David Denison and Alan Scott (ed.), Morphosyntactic Categories and the Expression of Possession, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, pp. 1-34.
- Allen, C 2012, 'The Poss(essive) Det(erminer) construction in Early Middle English writings', in Richard Dance and Laura Wright (ed.), The Use and Development of Middle English, Peter Lang Publishing Group, Germany, pp. 109-127.
- Allen, C 2012, 'Why a Determiner? The Possessive + Determiner + Adjective Construction in Old English', in Bettelou Los, Maria José López-Couso and Anneli Meurman-Solin (ed.), Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 245-270.
- Allen, C 2012, 'New perspectives, Theories and Methods: Lexical Functional Grammar', in Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton (ed.), English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, Germany, pp. 1646-1657.
- Allen, C 2010, 'Substantival adjectives in the history of English and the nature of syntactic change', in Rachel Hendery and Jennifer Hendriks (ed.), Grammatical Change: theory and description, Pacific Linguistics, Canberra, pp. 9-25.
- Allen, C 2009, 'On the disappearance of genitive types in Middle English: Objective genitives with nouns of love and fear and the nature of syntactic change', in M Dufresne, F. Dupuis and E. Vocaj (ed.), Historical linguistics 2007 : selected papers from the 18th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Montreal, 6-11 August 2007, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, pp. 49-60.
- Allen, C 2008, 'Book Review: A semantic approach to English grammar by R.M.V. Dixon', Linguistische Berichte, vol. 216, pages 493-501.
- Allen, C 2008, Genitives in Early English:Typology and Evidence, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.
- Allen, C 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 (ed.), Architectures, Rules, and Preferences; variations on themes by Joan W. Bresnan, CSLI Publications, USA, pp. 3-20.
- Allen, C 2015, 'Book Review: The diachronic typology of non-canonical subjects (Studies in Language Companion Series 140). Edited by Ilja A. Seržant & Leonid Kulikov. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013', Diachronica, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 277-283.
- Allen, C 2007, 'The case of the genitive in the Peterborough continuations', in Alexander Bergs and Janne Skaffari (ed.), The Language of the Peterborough Chronicle, Peter Lang Publishing Group, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, pp. 77-92.
- Allen, C 2006, 'Case Syncretism and Word Order Change', in Ans van Kemenade and Bettelou Los (ed.), The Handbook of the History of English, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Australia, pp. 201-223.
- Allen, C 2006, 'Possessives and determiners in Old English', in Terttu Nevalainen, Juhani Klemola, Mikko Laitinen (ed.), Types of Variation: Diachronic, dialectal and typological interfaces, John Benjamins Publishing Company, USA, pp. 149-170.
- Allen, C 2006, 'English: Old English', in Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed), Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 181-184pp.
- Allen, C 2005, 'Changes in case marking in NP: From Old English to Middle English', in Amberber, M. and de Hoop, H. (ed.), Competition and Variation in Natural Languages: The case for case, Elsevier, Amsterdam, pp. 223-249.
- Allen, C 2004, 'These Our Letters: The Dem Poss Construction from Old to Early Modern English', in Gunnar Bergh, Jennifer Herriman and Mats Mobarg (ed.), An international master of syntax and semantics: papers presented to Aimo Seppanen, Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Goteborg, Sweden, pp. 11-19.
- Allen, C 2004, 'A note on elliptical, absolute, and independent genitives in earlier English', English Language and Linguistics, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 351-354.
- Allen, C 2003, 'Deflexion and the development of the genitive in English', English Language and Linguistics, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1-28.
- Allen, C 2003, 'The Early English 'his Genitives' from a Germanic Perspective', Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society 2002, ed. Peter Collins and Mengistu Amberber, University of New South Wales, NSW, pp. 1-13.
- Allen, C 2002, 'Book review: Syntax, Structure, Meaning and Function', Australian Journal of Linguistics, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 272-277.
- Allen, C 2002, 'On the Development of a friend of mine', English Historical Syntax and Morphology, ed. Fanego, Teresa, Maria Jose Lopez-Couso, Perez=Guerra, Javier, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam, pp. 23-41.
- Allen, C 2002, 'Case and Middle English Genitive Noun Phrases', in Lightfoot, David W. (ed.), Syntactic Effects of Morphological Change, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 57-80.
- Allen, C 2002, 'The development of strengthened possessive pronouns in English', Language Sciences, vol. 24, no. 3-4, pp. 189-211.
- Allen, C 2001, 'The development of a new passive in English', in Miriam Butt, Tracy Holloway King (ed.), Time over Matter: Diachronic Perspectives on Morphosyntax, CSLI Publications, Leland Stanford Junior University, USA, pp. 43-72.
- Allen, C 2000, 'Obsolescence and sudden death in syntax: The decline of the verb-final order in Middle English', in Berm?dez-Otero, Ricardo (ed.), Generative Theory and Corpus Studies: A Dialogue from the Tenth International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (10ICEHL), Mouton de Gruyter, University of Manchester, England, pp. 3-25.
- Allen, C 1999, 'Review of Possession: Cognitive sources:forces and grammaticalization, by Bernd Heine', Studies in Language, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 673-684.
