ON THE CONTRASTIVE METHOD IN LINGUISTIC STUDIES
T e article specif es the place of contrastive linguistics in linguistic research, how it is dif erent from the other linguistic disciplines based on language comparison: comparative-historical linguistics, translation studies and typology. In particular, the author comments on one of the main concepts of contrastive linguistics formulated by A.A. Reformatsky: when comparing facts of language, one must study image/svg+xml those descriptive categories in which these facts are presented in each of the languages. Using a number of examples of Russian (conjunctions a to, prichemand the preposition krome), the author shows that comparing languages can lead to a revision of the categorial apparatus in a particular grammar area of one of them. T is becomes possible due to the development of new contrastive analysis methods, for instance, unidirectional and bidirectional analysis. T us, contrastive linguistics can solve not only practical problems, mostly related to foreign languages teaching, but also contribute to theoretical language description.