While comparing styles of discourse in academic settings across cultures a scholar faces a number of problems since structural similarity of linguistic units does not result in their stylistic equivalence. The paper examines the nature of the problems that arose in the course of comparing three articles on television discourse written in English and Russian by native and non-native speakers. It argues that the ways in which these linguistic units function in academic discourse of a particular culture can be determined only as a result of careful analysis of context and in view of a whole gamut of culturally specific means of realizing communicative meanings.

communicative style across cultures, stylistic feature, academic discourse, communicative strategy, contextual analysis