Markers of Ethnocultural Identity in Medical Research Papers

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.