Contrary to what the title might suggest, this book distinguishes itself from other publications with the same or similar titles (cf. Alexiadou & Wilder Reference Alexiadou and Wilder1998; Altenberg Reference Altenberg1982; Koike Reference Koike2004; Nunnally Reference Nunnally1985; Rosenbach Reference Rosenbach2002; Taylor Reference Taylor1996; Wit Reference Wit1997), in that it is not simply an historical study of the origin and development nor a collection of self-contained grammatical descriptions of the various genitive constructions available to the Early English writer (or possibly speaker). Rather it is a comprehensive study of all attested (major as well as minor) morphological genitive strategies from Old English to Early Modern English, which the author investigates keeping in mind one question: how and whether changes in the syntax of nominal phrases in the genitive case in Old English (and then in ME) can be related to other grammatical changes. It aims to give a complete account of what has been already argued and to sustain an original and innovative hypothesis on the formation of the English s-genitive. Accordingly, the single constructions are not investigated per se, but in relation to the linguistic system as reflected in the texts under examination. As in many historical studies, this book too addresses another question of fundamental importance: how similar written language is likely to be to spoken language, and how justifiable it is to consider as a colloquial feature a linguistic construction which is not attested in an expected period, but later – in other words whether the absence of evidence in a text of a certain period can be considered as a sign either of the absence of the linguistic feature tout court in that same period or of its appurtenance to a colloquial style. To answer this question, the author avails herself of an in-depth philological methodology thanks to which every text is appropriately and critically placed in relation with its contemporary textual exemplars, providing empirical support for her theoretical claims.

The discussion is organized chronologically according to linguistic constructions and subsystems through different periods ranging from Old English to Early Modern English. This diachronic construction-based approach offers the reader a host of new insights into the nature of morphological change and variation, allowing, on the one hand, a historical reconstruction of the changes effected by the morphological realization of the genitive case in English, but also, on the other hand, a typological comparison of English morphological structures with their equivalents in other languages.

The theoretical background of the discussion is Lexical Functional Grammar. However, the author's argumentation is easily accessible even for those who are alien to Lexical Functional Grammar or any other formal theory, thanks to the interesting and comprehensive synthetic presentation (chapter 1), which acquaints the reader with the relevant terminology, and with the numerous examples which substantiate the theoretical claims. Therefore, it can be more precisely considered as a sophisticated analysis of the data enriched by insights from the LFG approach and by cross-linguistic comparison.

The book contains eight chapters, an appendix, a list of references and an index. The first chapter is an exhaustive introduction to the relevant terminology, the theoretical assumptions on which the author bases her argumentation, and the methodology she follows. This prolegomenon is indeed necessary to introduce the reader both to the theory and the terminology the author adopts. For example, Allen uses the term ‘genitive’ to refer not only to the Old English inflectional case and the Middle English possessive marker -es, but also to ‘phrases which would have been in the genitive case in OE’ (p. 1), and in this respect she uses it synonymously in alternation with ‘possessor phrase’, both including possessive pronouns, s-genitive, and of-genitive. After a short chapter on adnominal genitives (or in Allen's terminology possessive constructions) in other Germanic languages (chapter 2), which provides background for the subsequent discussion of the English constructions, we find two extensive chapters on the genitive case in Old English (chapter 3) and Middle English (chapter 4): the former provides the information concerning the genitive case in Old English necessary to any explanation of the later development of genitive constructions, paying special attention to the case marking system; the latter investigates the reflexes of the inflectional genitive and the rise of new constructions such as the group genitive and the so-called his-genitive or ‘separated genitive’ in the author's terminology. A comparative analysis of the similar-looking ‘possessor doubling’ constructions in other Germanic languages (chapter 5) is a preliminary step to establishing similarities to, and differences from, the English his-genitive and accordingly to comparing and contrasting them with the development of ‘separated genitives’ (chapter 6), and the relationship between this construction and the rise of the group genitive. The final chapter documents the history of constructions with concurrent possessives and determiners.

Each chapter is introduced by a critical overview of the previous linguistic literature and by a very fine and detailed description of the usage, frequency and features of the various genitive constructions produced in the different phases of English, and of the same construction in other languages. Whereas both the critical overview and the grammatical description are so exhaustive and far-reaching that they compensate for any possible deficit of knowledge on the part of the reader, less comprehensive is the typological approach, since the languages other than English are mainly Indo-European and more specifically Germanic, the only exception being the brief reference to the Turkish ‘suspended affixation’ and to the Hungarian and the Papiamentu possessor doubling construction. Accordingly, I would consider such a comparison to be genealogic rather than typological. Nichol's (Reference Nichols1992) work on genealogical vs typological cross-linguistic similarity would have been a useful source of information for this chapter. In spite of this terminological divergence, the author convincingly justifies her selection of languages since ‘a comparison with similar changes in other languages will surely be useful in helping us to understand what happened, and to seek explanations for why a particular change took place in one language but not in a closely related one’ (p. 5) and ‘Typology . . . is useful in diachronic syntax to help narrow down possible explanations for a particular change’ (p. 5).

Unlike most books dealing with genitive constructions or genitive case within diachronic linguistics, this book dedicates substantial attention to the investigation of the nature of evidence. More precisely, every chapter dedicated to historical phases of the English language is introduced by an excellent and detailed description of the corpus and of the criteria adopted in evaluating and comparing linguistic data taken from different texts, since they could be either copies of contemporary or more ancient texts or originals, written in different areas and thus likely to show different dialect-dependent linguistic features. To cite one example, in the fourth chapter, on genitive case in Middle English, there is a long section, subdivided into five sub-paragraphs, discussing the texts on which the empirical research is based. First of all, it is made clear that especially for the earlier periods of Middle English one has to take into consideration that literatim or letter-by-letter copying was at the time very common and therefore it is important to exclude copies of earlier English compositions. Moreover, Middle English texts show a peculiar relationship between their date of composition and the inflectional complexity of their language. The Final Continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle, for instance, written in 1155, shows less case morphology than the AƷenbite of Inwit, written in 1340. Middle English texts need to be classified according to the degree of case morphology. For that reason, Early Middle English texts, written in the interval 1150 to 1350, are organized into three groups, according to the state of the case system for which they give evidence – ‘inflection-rich’ texts where the distinction between cases at the category level is reflected in the use of distinct forms, ‘case-rich but inflection-poor’ texts where, in spite of good evidence for a dative/accusative category distinction, agreement is less regular, and ‘case-impoverished’ texts where there is no clear evidence for a category case distinction. Furthermore, given the great deal of diatopic variation in the original Early Middle English texts, a simple chronological periodization cannot possibly be sufficient. Consequently, for a restricted number of particularly interesting texts, including some poetry, the area in which they are written represents the basis of analysis: thus the differences between the two versions of Laʒamon's Brut appear to be dependent on the conservative nature of the manuscript's geographical dialect. Such an organization allows the author to establish a clear connection between deflexion and changes to the status of the genitive inflection in Middle English and to demonstrate the untenability of the generally accepted hypothesis that the disappearance of the genitive case was triggered by the disappearance of the dative/accusative category distinction.

In more general terms, the chapters are well structured, organized in a reader-friendly fashion, and as comprehensive as one can expect in a book of this type. Particularly excellent are the several overviews of the scientific literature: they offer the reader all the necessary elements to compare the author's argumentation with previous hypotheses as well as a complete list of references for those who would like to conduct further research in this field – the author herself suggests some areas in need of such research (§ 8.3). A more detailed discussion of selected chapters will give the reader a clear picture of the content. For that purpose, I've selected chapters 5, 6 and 7, the first two because they contain the author's theoretical core argumentation on the development of the English s-genitive and at the same time represent a practical exemplification of the methodology adopted in this book, and the third because it exemplifies the power of theory when backed up by empirical research.

Genitive constructions involving a possessive pronoun, such as the Dutch Jan z'n fiets, are traditionally (Stahl Reference Stahl1927; Behagel Reference Behagel1932), but also more recently (cf. Ramat Reference Ramat, Kastovsky and Szwedek1986a; de Wit Reference Wit1997; Delsing Reference Delsing, Alexiadou and Wilder1998; Weerman & de Wit Reference Weerman and de Wit1999; Strunk Reference Strunk2004; Haegeman Reference Haegeman and Agder2004), considered to correspond to the same pattern in every Germanic language, having the same origin and development. Any possible present differentiation would represent a different development stage. Thus the Middle English examples of ‘detached’ possessive markers (e.g. þo was in Norwei his erþ a king ‘Then was in Norway's earth a king’ [Brut (O) 5635]) would constitute a unity with the Jan z'n fiets pattern. While the present reviewer had herself assumed the unity of these constructions (Vezzosi Reference Vezzosi2000), it should be emphasized that the richness of Allen's data and the clarity of her argumentation convince me of her new hypothesis. She contends that the instantiations of constructions with a possessive pronoun in Dutch, German, Low Saxon and Scandinavian languages are substantially different from the English constructions where the possessive marker is written detached from the possessor, and therefore must be treated separately, naming the former ‘possessor doubling constructions’ (chapter 5) – ‘prenominal periphrastic construction’ in Delsing's (Reference Delsing, Alexiadou and Wilder1998) terminology, ‘resumptive possessive pronoun construction’ in Norde's (2004b: 57) terminology – and regarding the latter as a ‘separated genitive’. To prove her argument – i.e. that apparently similar sentences such as EModE and come into Ethelstan his tente (CMPOLYCH, VI, 437.3201) and Middle Dutch Grote Kaerle zijn zoon (Cron.v.Brab. 791(1565)) are instead profoundly different – the author surveys the doubling possessor constructions in Germanic languages other than English from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective, summing up the major characteristics shared by all Germanic languages under investigation, but alien to the separated genitive in English. To mention just a few, if a language has both a doubling construction and the s-genitive inherited from Germanic, ‘they typically exhibit syntactic differences, with the s-genitive having the more restricted distribution. The s-genitive seems to be always attached to the possessor. . . [and] does not agree with the possessor phrase in gender and number’ (p. 218); ‘where agreement morphology is available, the linker pronoun furthermore agrees in grammatical features with the possessum’ (p. 218) and ‘when a pronoun is used which is capable of showing features such as number and gender of the possessor, it usually also shows these features in the doubling construction’ (p. 218). On the other hand, the similar-looking English construction, since its first attestation (Early Middle English), showed an invariable linking element (variously written as ys, is or his/hys), and only much later (Early Modern English) did it begin to have an agreeing possessive element. To select the significant English evidence with which to support her analysis, the author does not rely exclusively on the use of large electronic corpora, but retraces all the examples in the actual text so as to exclude the instances of left dislocation or external possessors. In this way she is able to re-contextualize all her examples and to date the first unambiguous separated genitive to the thirteenth century and its widespread diffusion to the fourteenth century, a period characterized by the frequent use of a single possessive marker at the end of appositives and conjoined possessors: since the constraints of occurrence are parallel, the author contends that both instances could easily be the results of the same phenomenon, i.e. the diminished degree of attachment of the possessive marker. This claim is further buttressed by a theoretical analysis in terms of projecting vs non-projecting particles (Toivonen Reference Toivonen2001): ‘the advent of group genitives in LME would signal that the possessive marker had been reanalysed as a projecting particle, while the appearance of combined genitives, either separated or attached, could be treated as the retention of the old analysis of the possessive marker as a non-projecting particle, in competition with the new analysis’ (p. 252).

Allen's theoretical approach turns out to be particularly felicitous in the analysis of some marginal Old English genitive patterns and their successive developments: Det Poss (e.g. þysne eowerne cyning ‘(lit.) This-acc your-acc king’) and Poss Det (e.g. minum þam ecan life ‘(lit.) my-dat the-dat eternal-dat life’) constructions. While the traditional literature classifies these patterns as heavily Latin-influenced, Allen claims and proves that the two constructions can be explained in terms of Old English grammar and have rather different discourse functions. Poss Det, always combined with an adjective, has the function of emphasizing the adjective, often contrastively. This native English construction is analysed as follows: given that possessive pronouns and genitives are treated in the same way as the Specs of DP, DP can be an ‘extended projection’ of adjective phrases, i.e. an adjective phrase can be a complement to a determiner (OE se) whereas the lexical entry for the determiner minum supplies the genitive case. Its disappearance is not the outcome of a change in the nature of Poss, but depends on the loss of the ability of a determiner to take an adjective phrase complement. Moreover, Det Poss is easily explained in terms of internal-language motivations and has parallels in other Germanic languages, such as Modern German (Plank Reference Plank1992; Demske Reference Demske2001) and early stages of German, Old Saxon, and Dutch (Behagel Reference Behagel1923; Heinrichs Reference Heinrichs1954; Korne & Rinkel Reference Korne and Tineke1987): constantly without any adjective, the demonstrative fills a topic-like position in the left periphery of the nominal phrase, Det being lexically expressed both by the demonstrative/determiner se and by the demonstrative þes. Its association with Latin register is in some way responsible for its gradual disappearance, becoming more and more a feature of written, rather than spoken, language. As a matter of fact this pattern disappears in the eighteenth century after flourishing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In other words, the history of combinations of determiners and possessives in English is also the history of changes in style and preferences.

Another aspect I would like to draw attention to pertains to the domain of analysis covered by Allen's book. Almost every synchronic and diachronic study on genitives, either in English or any other language, focuses only on adnominal genitives. This also occupies the heart of Allen's book. Nevertheless, she does not ignore the relationship between the genitive case used adnominally in possessor phrases and the genitive case used to mark the objects of certain verbs, as well as adverb phrases and the complements of some adjectives. She accordingly systematically investigates the genitive case involved in arguments, with the aim of establishing a relative chronology of the loss of these non-adnominal functions in ME with the changes which took place within the Nominal Phrase. Even if her investigation is necessarily restricted – and the author herself suggests possible directions for future research – some of Allen's major findings require the rethinking of widely accepted accounts of language change and of the history of English: for example, the relationship between deflexion and changes to genitive constructions.

Allen's book is remarkable for the breadth of its coverage, its in-depth analysis of English genitive constructions in their development and change, its wealth of information, and for its generalizations regarding the nature and mechanisms of language change. Above all, the originality of her approach, which combines empirical research, theoretical discussion and a diachronic and comparative perspective of analysis, enables Allen to analyse English genitive constructions from a new and illuminating perspective. In summary, this book is a must for readers who want a complete overview of the topic and for those who want to carry out further research on genitives.