English, Old English

Cynthia L Allen has a B.A. in Spanish and linguistics from the University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is a Reader in the School of Language Studies at the Australian National University, where she is also the Director of the Centre for Research on Language Change. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her specialty is history of English syntax, particularly Old and Middle English syntax. Her 1995 monograph Case marking and reanalysis: grammatical relations from Old to Early Modern English, published by Clarendon Press, explores the relationship between the reduction of case marking in English and some changes to grammatical relations. Her most recent work focuses on the syntax of the noun phrase in Old English and the history of adnominal possessives in Old and Middle English and how the developments found in English relate to developments in other Germanic languages.