Starting from the assumption that local and disciplinary cultures have an impact on the rhetorical organization of the text and on identity construction within a genre (Fløttum, Dahl and Kinn 2006, for academic genres), this paper takes a corpus-assisted approach to genre variation across English and Italian research articles in history. Specifically, the main emphasis lies on conclu* and its lemmatizations, or, more precisely, on second-level Summarizers and Concluders (Siepmann 2005), and the way they interact with other discourse markers (primarily Summarizers and Resumers, and Inferrers) and metadiscourse across moves. As will be seen, second-level discourse markers (SLDMs) represent a marked option, in that they add extra meaning to their more general, more transparent, more frequent, and less specific counterparts. Whereas variation within the unit or pattern results from combinations with discourse markers from the same or other categories, variation across English and Italian is better accounted for within an interpersonal model of metadiscourse (Hyland 2005, 2008), in terms of different strategies on the interactional level.