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The article specifies the place of contrastive linguistics in linguistic
research, how it is different 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 those descriptive categories in which these facts are presented in each of the languages.
Using a number of examples of Russian (conjunctions a to, prichem and 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. This becomes
possible due to the development of new contrastive analysis methods, for instance,
unidirectional and bidirectional analysis. Thus, contrastive linguistics can solve not
only practical problems, mostly related to foreign languages teaching, but also
contribute to theoretical language description.