A collostruction-based approach to the Integrated Contrastive Model: The idiomaticity of causative constructions in English, French and French learner English

Collostructional analysis is a family of techniques aimed at investigating the interface between lexis and grammar (Stefanowitsch & Gries 2003, Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004a, 2004b). It relies on the theoretical framework of Construction Grammar and the methodology of quantitative corpus linguistics to measure the association strength between a construction and the lexemes occurring in a given slot of this construction (its ‘collexemes’). In this presentation, collostructional analysis will be combined with the Integrated Contrastive Model (Granger 1996, Gilquin 2000/2001), which investigates transfer on the basis of a contrastive interlanguage analysis of learner and native corpora, and a contrastive analysis of comparable/parallel corpora. This combined approach will be used to study the idiomaticity of periphrastic causative constructions, and more precisely the association between the causative verb (make) and its non-finite complement. After showing that the [X make Y Vinf] construction displays strong lexical preferences for certain (classes of) verbs in the non-finite verb slot (Gilquin 2006), I will present the results of a contrastive collostructional analysis of the English construction and its French equivalent [X faire Vinf Y], based on the British National Corpus (for English) and Scientext (for French) and carried out thanks to Coll.analysis (Gries 2007). The similarities and differences in the preferred verbal complements of the two constructions will be highlighted. These results will then be related to the results of a collostruction-based contrastive interlanguage analysis comparing native English data (from the British National Corpus) with learner English data produced by French-speaking students (from the International Corpus of Learner English). Data representing other learner populations will also be used sporadically, as a way of confirming the possible role of transfer in French-speaking learners’ non-idiomatic uses of the make causative construction