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Cross-cultural differences in academic discourse as a field of applied linguistic research became mainstream at the end of the 20th century. Two fundamental concepts emerged at that period: one highlighted universal features of academic discourse, the other focused on ethnocultural peculiarities of cognitive and textual structures. Research in the field of academic discourse becomes particularly significant when applied to training and education of academic staff. Accepting the idea of universal features of academic discourse, we, however, tend to support the concept claiming that academic writing style may contain markers of ethnocultural identity of their authors. So, the aim of our research was to identify markers of ethnocultural identity in medical research texts. The study included comparative discourse analysis of research focused medical texts created by English-speaking (ES) and Russian-speaking (RS) authors. The results obtained have drawn us to the conclusion that despite universal features that scientific medical texts of the same genres share, they nevertheless manifest specific properties depending on the linguistic and cultural affiliation of their authors, i.e. markers of ethnocultural identity. This knowledge can contribute to international academic communication.

The subject of this article is a comparative analysis of female images questioning their stereotypical gender roles and definition, based on the 'Performative Theory' of gender and sexuality. The idea behind this theory is to deconstruct female/male opposition by assuming that gender is 'performative', in that it is created by the person's behaviour, rather than physical gender and role imposed by social and biological constraints. Parallels are drawn between selected works of Anton Chekhov, Katherine Mansfield, and Vladimir Nabokov in order to prove that all three made a revolutionary literary contribution in challenging the perception of a woman as an artist and as an individual. Attention is drawn to the reasons for comparing the works of the writers and to recent developments in feminist critical response to Nabokov's art. The article analyses examples in which the three authors adopt the voices of the opposite sex to narrate their stories and compare the effect they achieve by doing so. The focus is placed on female characters questioning their sexual definition and intellectual and emotional identity. The quest for an atypical interpretation of the female voice in these authors dominates this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]