Cultural specifics of academic writing genre: category of authority

Recent studies of various discourse types, including the scientific one, show that in communication process the authority of the participants is one of the important communicative categories realized with a set of linguistic and graphic means. They can have some specifics in the texts belonging to the same genre but different linguistic cultures. The purpose of our study is to identify the most typical lexical and grammatical means (markers) used to realize the category of authority in scientific articles genre in the English and Russian linguistic cultures. The objects of the study were three groups of markers: the authority of general scientific facts and theories; the authority of top experts in a particular field and the authority of the author of a scientific article. The research material included a number of articles in Russian and English in the field of pedagogy, management and energy. The analysis revealed significant differences in the quantity of these markers depending on the scientific field and the particular language culture, as well as a direct correlation with the quantitative use of graphic markers of the category (tables, graphs, etc.). In addition, some differences were observed in the choice of language means, particularly, the lexical and grammatical content of speech clichés, as well as some differences in syntactic patterns of the means. Theoretical importance of the analysis proves the need to study and systematize language tools used to realize the main communicative parameters of a scientific text. The practical results can be used to develop recommendations for academic writing.