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.

Metadiscourse has been extensively studied in various genres, e.g. newspaper discourse, casual conversation, textbooks, advertisements, and research articles. Studies focusing on metadiscourse in research articles often omit analysing abstracts and traditionally investigate research articles only according to the IMRAD structure. This paper explores metadiscoursive elements in Czech and English research article abstracts in philosophy and medicine at two levels of analysis, interlingual and interdisciplinary. The aim is to investigate whether scientific writers of research article abstracts identify more with their cultural identity or whether their identity is rather discipline-specific. The theoretical framework adopted in this study is a tax-onomy of metadiscourse markers proposed by Dafouz-Milne (2008) since it takes into account a functional differentiation of metadiscourse elements. The interlingual analysis reveals no major cultural distinctions, the interdisciplinary analysis proves that metadiscourse is more prevalent in humanities. Thus, we can conclude that academic writers of RA abstracts identify more with their disciplinary culture.

Participants in a conversational exchange may express their viewpoints in a number of ways, or put more precisely, they use various ways of expressing their viewpoints. When employing phrases such as It is likely that ..., perhaps ..., actually ..., it is possible that..., and I think that ..., etc., speakers modify the meaning, or the illocutionary force, of the utterances they make. This feature, which has been called ‘modality’, is present, among others, in the genre of political interview and serves various functions. The present contribution offers an inquiry into the linguistic means that politicians utilize to modify their involvement in, or their detachment from, the proposition and in this way they alter the meaning of their statements.