Academic authors employ various language means in order to construct and disseminate knowledge, to sound persuasive, to undergird their arguments, but also to seek agreement within the academic community. The aim of this paper is to analyse a selected group of rhetorical strategies used by Anglophone and Czech authors of Linguistics research articles (RAs) and research theses (RTs). These strategies are assumed to vary in both academic genres since the position of their writers within the academic community differs. Even though authors of RAs have to meet reviewers’ requirements in order for their article to be published, so their relative position may be lower than that of the reviewers’, authors of RAs may have the same “absolute status” as the reviewers may be just as expert in that particular field. By contrast, the status of research students is lower than that of their evaluators both in relative and absolute terms. Even though students may gain some learned authority in presenting an original contribution, their assessors command both learned and institutional authority, hence are endowed with a higher status. Apart from comparing rhetorical strategies used in RAs and RTs, the paper focuses on cross-cultural differences between Anglophone and Czechacademic writing traditions.

The article examines the disciplinary preferences of medical and psychology writers of research articles (RAs) in the use of epistemic lexical verbs (ELVs), regarding their frequency, prominence, distribution across the RA sections, and recurrent phraseology. The results show that disciplinary affiliation affects these phenomena, as more ELVs are found in psychology than in medicine. Both groups prefer speculative judgements and quotative evidence and most frequently use ELVs in Discussions. Yet, psychology authors are more balanced in their preferences and rely on a wider selection of frequent ELVs which are often combined with self-mention. Medical authors are more inclined towards deductive ELVs. Disciplinary differences are also observed in the choice of the specific ELVs, their frequency distributions and phraseology in the distinct RA sections.

Our purpose in this paper is to show how the output of academic student-writers demonstrates the different ways in which they react to the discipline’s discoursal demands and how that, in turn, forms their writer identity. We also argue that the current Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory fails to adequately integrate notions of second language (L2) academic writer identity and the social contexts in which L2 writers produce their texts.