[BobK]

Originally Posted by Anglika

So far as I am aware, it always has been acceptable and it is certainly possible.

[Davies/BYU] BYU-BNC: British National Corpus

It's interesting, though, that while 'last night' and 'yesterday night' are both acceptable, only 'yesterday evening' is (in my dialect, that is, which is pretty middle-of-the-road - my son once had a nursery rhyme tape with a song that started 'Last evening Cousin Peter came' - which struck me as very odd).

http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin...terday+evening (90 hits)

but

http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin...y=last+evening (64 hits)

b