ABSTRACT
A successful academic career requires writers to get credit for the ideas they come up with: to claim personal authority and ownership of their claims. In this chapter, the authors investigate how the construction of a rhetorical self has changed using a ‘lexico-grammatical profile’ of we. Meaning arises from patterns of lexico-grammatical co-occurrence. The lexico-grammatical profile of we conducted reveals how the persuasive feature works in its immediate linguistic environment. The lexico-grammatical profile has been used to examine learner corpora and translations rather than in academic discourse. Applied linguistics stands out by its frequent use of verbs related to research activities, such as approach, begin and draw on, foregrounding the writers’ involvement in real-world academic work. Personal reference helps writers to strengthen their credibility and reinforce their role in the research, which in turn helps them gain acceptance and credit for their claims.
