One question that may still be in your mind after having read about all these topics, is the following : what exactly is the relationship between
'applied'linguistics and'pure'or'mainstream'linguistics? As we suggested in Chapter, it would be a mistake assume that applied linguistics is nothing more than some kind of ancillary branch of linguistics, which simply takes ideas from mainstream theoretical or
descriptive linguistics and applies them to a range of practical problems.
While it is certainly true that applied linguiscics draws extensively on research and theory originally developed in 'mainstream' linguistics, it is equally important to emphasize that applied linguistics goes well beyond the scope of 'mainstream' linguistics in its endeavour to address realworld issues. In doing so, it has contributed a number of important new
perspectives back into linguistic research and theory. For reasons of space, we will restrict ourselves to
just one set of illustrative examples here, by considering some of the contributions that applied linguistics has made to one of 'the most ostensibly abstract and theoretical of all of the subfields within linguistics : grammatical theory.