To gain a greater understanding of how speakers construct their disciplinary-situated identities and interact with their addressee(s) in Lithuanian spoken academic discourse, this corpus-based exploratory analysis focuses on the use of mes ‘we’ as a marker of stance and engagement in lecturers’ speech in Lithuanian university lectures on business administration and medicine. The data reveals that the lecturers in business administration used only the inclusive mes ‘we’, which is known to promote student involvement and strengthen lecturer-student rapport. The instructors in medicine frequently employed the exclusive reference to indicate their belonging to professional communities and highlight their level of expertise in the discipline, creating a sense of distance between the lecturer and the student audience.

Although numerous studies have concentrated on individual discourse markers (henceforth, DMs) or their classes, little attention has been paid to their combinations, especially from a cross-linguistic perspective. Most of the studies are based on the English language data, whereas the combinatory potential of DMs in other languages remains largely unexplored. The present corpus-based study focuses on combinations of contrastive discourse markers (henceforth, CDMs) in English and Lithuanian by adopting Fraser’s (2013) approach to DMs. The aim of the study is to investigate the combinatory potential of CDMs in English and Lithuanian academic discourse, spoken discourse and fiction. The study presents a list of CDM combinations used in English and Lithuanian and investigates their semantic-pragmatic profile.