National discourse style: English and Russian business discourses

The paper presents the results of a comparative research of English and Russian business discourses in the written communication of the UK, USA and Russian universities. The author argues that business discourse goes beyond a professional sphere and can be interpreted as metaprofessional interaction on work-related matters within a social institute. Using descriptive and comparative methods of linguistic analysis the author has studied three business discourses - employment, workplace and human resource discourses in English and Russian communicative cultures. The results have identified both similarities and differences between the national discourses. While the similarities are considered to prove universal typological properties of business discourse, the differences demonstrate national identity of English and Russian business discourses. Additionally, they have allowed defining the concept of a national discourse style as a multimodal system of socio-cultural, pragmatic and language properties reflecting national identity of the discourse. In conclusion, the paper enumerates distinctive features of the English business discourse - structural unification of the texts, digital texts’ increase, informal register of communication, genre flexibility. The national identity of the Russian business discourse can be characterized by genre rigidness, formal register of communication, genre and text borrowings from the English discourse, text adaptation to the national practice, an increase in email communication.