Engagement markers are crucial interpersonal tools to interact with readers and draw support for the writer's positions. However, little is known about the effect of the writer's cultural background and language, as well as the context of publication, on the way authors use these strategies. The present study provides a quantitative and contrastive analysis based on a corpus consisting of business management articles written in different cultures and languages (Anglophone/English vs. Spanish) and aimed at different contexts of publication (local vs. international). The results obtained indicate that, although context of publication and national culture are powerful factors regulating the use of these strategies, other aspects such as L1 transfer and L2 proficiency may have some bearing on the use of these resources.

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In today's competitive world of academia, besides offering innovative and robust results, writing scholars must strategically deploy attitudinal evaluation to convince editors and reviewers that their research is valuable and worth publishing. Yet the use of these rhetorical resources can vary across different disciplines, languages and cultures. In addition, the audience for which authors are writing their research (local or international) can significantly influence the way attitudinal evaluation is used.My corpus consists of 72 research articles (RAs) published internationally in English in three different disciplines (Applied Linguistics, Business Management and Food Technology). A parallel corpus of 36 RAs published locally in Spanish in the same three disciplines has been used as a control group with the aim of establishing whether their different cultures/languages and the different degrees of competitiveness can determine the way attitudinal markers are used.Manual and electronic analyses have been combined to identify and quantify attitudinal markers in the texts. These markers were classified according to several parameters such as the entity evaluated (Thetela 1997), the type of value expressed and the subject receiving the evaluation. The results for the two sub-corpora were then statistically treated to allow us to find patterns through quantitative contrastive analysis.The results have shown that, besides significant disciplinary variation in the amount of attitudinal markers used, RA authors use evaluative strategies differently depending on the context of publication. Promoting the significance of one's work seems to be a more important strategy in order to get it published internationally, specially within the most competitive and urban disciplinary fields. Despite being generally regarded as belonging to the same genre, locally published RAs clearly deviate from international RAs in the use of these features, which suggests it may constitute a different subgenre with its own generic integrity. 1

The present paper investigates cultural and linguistic differences in the use of evaluation in Research Article (RA) introductions in the Social Sciences. To do this a corpus of published RA introductions written by English as a Native Language (ENL) researchers was compared with a corpus of introductions extracted from RAs manuscripts written by English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) users as part of the Sci-ELF corpus. The texts were analysed manually and several parameters of evaluation were identified, which made the classification of evaluative acts possible. The results revealed introductions by ELF writers do not comply with the CARS structure and show peculiar rhetorical and evaluative features which diverge from the Anglo-Saxon rhetorical patterns typically used by ENL writers.