01 Editorial.qxd Editorial Ibérica continues growing and expanding horizons. On this occasion it brings to the fore some subdisciplines, communicative contexts, methodologies, genres and practices that are emergent or have been under-represented in previous issues. A prime example of a subdiscipline barely explored in the scholarly literature is Intertextuality as a specialised area of Forensic Linguistics, dealt with by VICTORIA GUILLÉN NIETO in article 5 to show how plagiarism is detected in professional legal genres. Among other communicative contexts so far under-represented in this journal are the political scenario and the security forces, the former respectively tackled by ANA BELÉN CABREJAS and RICARDO CASAñ PITARCH in articles 4 and 9, and the latter, by ADRIÁN FUENTES LUQUE and ALAN CAMPBELL, in article 11. The political sphere comprises established genres with a long tradition behind them, such as the parliamentary speech (article 4), rich in tropes as evaluation devices, and others of more recent appearance and professionalization, as is the case of the campaign tweet (article 9). With regard to the second under-researched setting, the military, its communicative needs in English are pinpointed here in a seminal study (article 11) with a focus on the use of audio-visual translation–subtitling–for improving listening comprehension skills. Two other environments of current interest are Advertising, in particular its use of certain lexical items to enhance persuasion and, along with it, promotion (article 7, by MARISA DIEZ-ARROYO), and international English- medium publication, which in this issue gathers diverse topical targets and approaches, as well as very specific domains. Three contributions belong to this area: first, article 3, by by BIxI JIN, presents a qualitative content analysis of the linguistic requirements in the submission guidelines for research papers within the field of Chemical Engineering. Second, article 6, by SUJATA S. KATHPALIA and CHRISTOPHER S.G. KHOO, examines the functional relationship between citation and rhetorical moves in biology research articles. Third and last, article 8, by WEIYU ZHANG and YIN LING CHEUNG, explores how automated language processing tools can aid academic writers in two scientific disciplines–Biology and Medicine. As for methodologies, burgeoning instances are Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, with which ibérica 40 (2020): 9-12 iSSN: 1139-7241 / e-iSSN: 2340-2784 9 BELINDA CRAWFORD CAMICIOTTOLI (article 2) identifies ideological stance in economics lectures at university, and Sentiment Analysis, applied to economy reports by M. ÁNGELES ORTS in article 10. In addition, the present compilation of articles sheds light on a wide range of communicative practices of a varied nature: semiotic (in article 2), evaluative (in article 4), intertextual (in articles 5 and 6), interlingual (in article 11), expressive (in articles 9 and 10), and related to academic writing habits, such as the decision to adopt native standards (in article 3), or the rhetorical use of citation and recourse to automated processing tools, both in article 8. Our guest contribution, by LARISSA D’ANGELO and STEFANIA CONSONNI, reflects on a research topic of common concern and broad application: metadiscourse. It traces the category back to its origins, going through the different ‘waves’ of its theoretical and empirical development in Applied Linguistics and Discourse Analysis from the 1980s onwards. The authors especially address the evolution of metadiscourse over the last 40 years, providing an overview of its research across genres and media and pointing to the research discourses, theoretical frameworks and methodologies that have recently arisen. Under the metadiscursive lens, the collection of articles in this issue can be looked at from an alternative perspective that underlines the omnipresence and crucial role of discourse markers in professional communication. Thus, article 2 stresses the importance of semiotic ensembles combining verbal and nonverbal stance cues (i.e. prosody, gaze, gesture and body orientation) in discriminative listening during L2 economics lectures, to distinguish fact from opinion. Article 3 highlights clarity among the linguistic requisites most often demanded by high-impact journals, which begs the question of what incidence code glosses and shared knowledge markers, dependent on the type of audience and the disciplinary culture, may bear on textual intelligibility. Article 4 analyses the ideological nuances conveyed by political metaphor and metonymy as evaluative stance items, and article 5 informs us that evidentiality and affect markers may incline a forensic verdict towards plagiarism. Similarly, article 6 details the multiple metadiscursive functions of citations (i.e. as evaluators, signposters and boosters) in biology scientific papers, article 7 delves into the polysemic interpretations of the term ‘unique’ as a lexical booster in Advertising, and article 8 describes how certain clusters of connectives (e.g. causal, logical, adversative and contrastive, temporal and additive) provide cues for text organisation and do play a significant part in drawing links between ideas and clauses when automated language processing tools are used. Along these EDITORIAL ibérica 40 (2020): 9-1210 lines, article 9 underscores the salience of rhetorical questions to achieve nearness and appeal to emotion in political tweets, and notes the incorporation of emojis, which might be labelled as simultaneous stance and engagement items, while article 10 scrutinizes the language of emotion, both denotative and metaphorical, as a stance indicator in the institutional discourse of Economy and Finance. Article 11, finally, indirectly opens up new research paths as to the effectiveness of adding minimal code glosses to subtitles in order to improve aural comprehension. The ritualistic closure of every Ibérica editorial thanks those scholars who generously lent themselves to evaluating submissions, this time between January and June 2020. They are, in alphabetical order: Claudia Barahona (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain) Silvia Cacchiani (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia, Italy) Alan Campbell (Middle Tennessee State University, USA) Marta Carretero Lapeyre (Universidad Complutense, Spain) Pedro Jesús Castillo Ortiz (Universidad de Granada, Spain) Loi Chek Kim (Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Malaysia) Alejandro Curado Fuentes (Universidad de Extremadura, Spain) Aránzazu García Pinar (Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Spain) Pilar González Vera (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain) Deirdre Kant (Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy) Paul Miller (Universidad de Navarra, Spain) Giuseppina Scotto di Carlo (Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale, Italy) Dieter Stein (Universität Düsseldorf, Germany) Gert Vercauteren (Universiteit Antwerpen, Belgium) Feng Wang (Tongji University-Shanghai, China) Gao xia (Beihang University, Beijing, China) We hope that Ibérica keeps inspiring and encouraging international collaboration, some of whose fruitful outcomes we share in the coming pages. Carmen Sancho Guinda Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain) iberica@aelfe.org Editor-in-chief of Ibérica EDITORIAL ibérica 40 (2020): 9-12 11