Cynthia Allen

Biography

Dr Cynthia Allen was a 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. She is currently investigating the 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. Cynthia runs an Anglo-Saxon reading group meeting weekly during term time.