Cultural and disciplinary variation in academic discourse: The issue of influencing factors

This paper demonstrates the role of disciplinary context in shaping the common rhetorical and textual features of research texts in different languages and, more broadly, problematizes the validity of straightforward sociocultural explanations of rhetorical differences frequently used in the literature. The research is based on the contrastive genre analysis of English and Slavic (Ukrainian and Russian) conference abstracts in the field of applied mathematics. The features compared include rhetorical moves revealed and identified by reference to Swales' CARS model, their textual distribution, the paragraph organization of the texts, the syntactic structure of titles, and the use of personal pronouns I/we. The findings of the investigation compared with previously obtained results in the domain of applied linguistics show essential interdisciplinary variation between the two sets of data. This somewhat questions interpretations of rhetorical differences entirely based on the role of external determinants and highlights the importance of established traditions in various academic disciplines and cultures.