Naturalness and contrastive linguistics

Contrastive linguistics is currently undergoing a much-needed revival, thanks largely to the availability of multilingual computer corpora. Research groups are being set up in many countries, conferences are being held, reports and papers are appearing, and there is a growing sense of excitement in the field. A distinctive research programme for contrastive linguistics is still lacking, however. This paper tries to suggest what such a research programme could look like, and what kind of theoretical framework might be helpful to underpin the work of the next few years.