Thematic scope of academic discourse

Problem statement. The article is devoted to the concept of theme and its explanatory potential. The studied phenomenon is the thematic breadth of the discourse. It seems that communicators have certain hypotheses about the thematic content of communication in various communicative situations. The thematic structure of the discourse can be more or less developed. In a communicative situation there can be only one global theme or many different topics. The choice of the topic depends on the culture, for example, in different countries there are different topics taboos. Some topics are very common in certain cultures. The hypothesis of the study is that people have an intuitive idea of what is appropriate in communication, the topics to talk about or one global theme of conversation. Objective. The purpose of the article is the thematic analysis of the academic communication in Germany and Russia. The used research methods are the cultural comparative analysis and discourse analysis. Research results. The author analyzes the choice of a more or less broad topic in academic communication in different cultures. Conclusion. It is claimed that the Russian academic communication is oriented on the thematic breadth, in the German academic discourse the depth of content is more preferable.