ABSTRACT
Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) has been extensively documented in the area of lexis. The literature contains three different understandings of what CLI entails. First, the traditional view considers CLI to involve a process of transferring knowledge from one language to another. Second, transfer is also sometimes described as a communication strategy. Finally, a third construction of transfer has recently emerged: transfer as “inert outcome”. Particularly, corpus-based studies have helped to broaden the scope of the linguistic phenomena investigated and to describe the range of linguistic effects this process of transferring knowledge may have on a learner’s language. The study of CLI “depends greatly on the systematic comparisons of languages provided by contrastive analyses”. Corpus-based studies have mostly investigated forward transfer; however, in the future, corpus-based transfer research should underscore the importance of studying the full range of learners’ multilingual backgrounds instead of focusing exclusively on CLI from the learners’ First Languages.
