In Schneider’s evolutionary model (2007: 120), AusE may be regarded as having attained exonormative stabilisation during the 19th century. This can be traced for its spoken form during the 1870s–80s (Yallop 2003), and seen in the preliminary codification of its distinctive lexicon in the 1890s (Peters 2009). Its colloquial idiom was celebrated in the narrative works of the later nineteenth century, especially the short stories of life outside the city by authors such as AJ Boyd and Henry Lawson.
This early AusE is sampled along with other narrative and news discourse from the COOEE corpus, as explained above (Section 3.1). The frequencies obtained from the unequal-sized subcorpora of news and narrative can be compared through the nor- malisations per one million words provided in brackets in columns 2 and 3. Com- parisons can also be made between the total frequencies for zero and -ly form in this corpus of later 19th century AusE, shown as percentages in the bottom two rows of Table 3, with those of ICE-AUS, shown in the bottom two rows of Table 2. The pooled data are analysed according to the syntactic criteria discussed above in Sections 3 and 4.
Table 3. Distribution of dual adverbs in 19th century Australian texts and syntactic contexts
News 80,000 wds
(norm.) raw
Narrative 250,000
wds raw (norm.)
Total freq.
both sources
With dyn.
cop.
verb
Before lexical/
main V
After verb VI/
VT
Mod.
adv/prep phrase
Mod.
in adj phrase
bad 16 (64) 16 7 7 2
badly 1 (12.5) 10 (40) 11 4 6 1
close 1 (12.5) 15 (60) 16 4 12
closely 4 (50) 8 (32) 12 3 8 1
high 4 (50) 20 (80) 24 1 11 4 8
highly 4 (50) 12 (48) 16 3 2 11
quick 6 (24) 6 4 2
quickly 2 (25) 23 (92) 25 6 19
slow
slowly 3 (37.5) 14 (56) 17 9 8
Total zero
adverb 5 (62.5) 57 (228) 62 (43%) 8 26 (38%) 16 12 (48%)
Total
-ly 14 (175) 67 (268) 81 (57%) 25 43 (62%) 13 (52%)
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The COOEE sample data presented in Table 3 give a somewhat different synopsis of the roles of dual adverbs in later 19th century AusE from that of the ICE-AUS data shown in Tables 1 and 2. Overall, the ratio of zero to -ly forms in COOEE (43% to 57%) is a good deal closer than in the ICE-AUS corpus. An explanation for this could be sought in the rather small amount of formal writing in the corpus (only in the news subcorpus); and the overall proportion of zero to -ly adverbs (normalised as 62.5 to 175) is lower in news, with no examples at all for bad, quick, slow. By contrast the fre- quencies of bad, close, high in the narrative subcorpus are all substantially higher than the corresponding -ly forms, contributing to the increasingly flamboyant mix of col- loquial elements in late 19th century Australian short stories, such as those of Lawson (Peters 2014).
The use of zero adverbs with a dynamic copula (shown in column 5) is relatively more common in the 19th than 20th century data, since the raw figures from the sam- ple COOEE corpus (c. 330,000 words) should be multiplied by three for comparison with those from ICE-AUS shown in Table 2.10 The range of dynamic copular verbs found with bad was notably wider than in the ICE-AUS data, including feel, smell, get (got too bad), go, take (as in took bad), and there were additional transitive and intran- sitive constructions:
(20) … got the dysentery very bad (COOEE Narrative corpus 1851–75) (21) …[they] want paintin’ jest as bad as ever (Lawson, 1896)
(22) …didn’t do bad ourselves (Boyd, 1882)
(23) How are you getting on with the maize? …Bad (COOEE Narrative corpus 1876–99)
(24) The season’s turned so out-and-out bad (COOEE Narrative corpus 1851–1975)
Other remarkable uses of the zero adverb are registered in column 8 of Table 3, where the largish number of instances of close premodifying another adverbial includes several combinations that have not yet grammaticalised into a complex preposition like close to (though there were ample examples of close to in the 19th century data as well). Other combinations with close as premodifier included several instances of close by:
10. If we multiply by three the total use of zero adverbs with dynamic copulas (8) shown in Table 3, the normalised frequency is 24 for 19th century AusE. Compare this with the total use of zero adverbs with dynamic copulas (9) shown in Table 2 for the 20th century AusE.
Free ebooks ==> www.ebook777.comDual adverbs in Australian English 197 (25) … another farmer’s daughter living close by (Lawson 1896)
(26) … secured in the White Hills lockup close by (COOEE News corpus 1851–1875)
as well as other one-off combinations:
(27) … tethering horses close around (COOEE Narrative corpus 1851–1875) (28) … were snoring close about me (COOEE Narrative corpus 1851–1875) (29) … rolling so close beside the path (COOEE Narrative corpus 1851–1875) All these provide examples of the collocational flexibility of adverbial close in 19th cen- tury Australian writing, especially in examples like the close-on-setting sun. Its uses as an adverbial modifier (column 8) far outnumber the instances found in late twentieth century data (Table 2, column 6). The same goes for adverbial high, also used to qualify other locative adverbials in prepositional phrases, as in (tucked) high above the knees and high up in the ranges, a type not matched at all in the late-20th century data from ICE-AUS. All these uses of the zero adverbs are qualitative evidence of their greater flexibility in nineteenth century AusE, apart from their greater frequency overall, vis- ible when you compare the percentages in the bottom two rows of Table 3 with those of Table 2. The more equal distribution of the two forms in postverbal position (column 7) also suggests greater potential interchangeability between them, and more scope for free variation between them.
The comparative data on dual adverbs drawn from 19th and 20th century AusE suggest that use of zero adverbs has shrunk dramatically for the five adverbs investi- gated (from 43% to 23%),11 reducing their availability as alternative or complemen- tary forms to -ly. A further factor is the relatively low use of highly as intensifier in adjectival phrases in the 19th century Australian corpus (Table 3), contrasting with its substantial use in the ICE-AUS corpus of late 20th century usage (see Table 2).
The markedly different ratios between zero and -ly for the 19th and 20th centuries may reflect the different quantities of news and narrative within the minicorpus.
This question, and the extent to which reduced use of zero adverbs is evidenced in comparable data from BrE, will be further investigated in Section 6. Using parallel corpora from the 19th and 20th centuries, we may be able to show how indepen- dent or otherwise the Australian trends are from the parent variety in the northern hemisphere.
11. These are the percentages for the overall use of zero vs -ly: see Table 2 for 20th century and Table 3 for 19th century.
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