Dual adverbs in Australian English

Dual or dual-form adverbs are those found with and without the -ly suffix in modern English (e.g. deep/deeply), providing alternative forms for adverbial constituents or modifiers within the clause. But research on British English has shown decreasing numbers of fully interchangeable pairs. This paper investigates five dual adverbs in 19th and 20th century Australian English, examining their syntactic behaviour in writing as well as transcribed speech and scripted dialogue. Parallel data from the Australian and British ICE corpora, as well as custom-built mini-corpora of 19th century Australian and British English (news and narrative texts) are compared, showing far more zero forms in 19th century Australian data than a century later, and lower levels of use altogether in the British data. Keywords: dual adverbs; zero adverb; -ly adverb; Australian English; British English