WHAT APPLIED LINGUISTICS GAINS FROM RESEARCH INTO CONTRASTIVE PHRASEOLOGY

Abstract

Though contrastive linguistic research is usually initiated by practice, the analysis often reduces to a theoretical discussion of the issue, whereas the practical application of the results

of research is often very limited. This situation occurs due to the fact that practitioners are often discouraged by the complicated explanations of comparative theoretical analyses, even though such explanations may prove very useful to monolingual descriptive linguists as well (since they view their mother tongue through the prism of another language). Researchers interested in studying language contact may benefit even more from this type of research, as may individuals living in a bilingual or multilingual environment in their everyday language use. This paper focuses on the practical gains of Hungarian and Serbian contrastive linguistic investigations, with special emphasis placed on the theoretical and practical benefits of the analysis of phraseological units.