The Integrated Contrastive Model: Spicing up your data

This article shows how the approach of Contrastive Analysis can be combined with that of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis in what has been called the Integrated Contrastive Model (Granger 1996a). Through the illustration of English and French causative constructions, it is demonstrated that corpus contrastive data can help explain some of the characteristics of learners’ interlanguage and thus throw new light on the key notion of transfer, which emerges as a more complex phenomenon than was traditionally assumed.