01 Editorial.qxd Editorial Another stage opens in Ibérica’s journey, this time with a new, larger Editorial Team that will concentrate efforts on maintaining the academic quality and international visibility that we have attained so far, as well as on upgrading the current management system and revamping the journal’s image. We are aware that the challenges lying ahead are massive, but we undertake them enthusiastically and with deep gratitude to our predecessors, who have paved the way for us, working so hard and efficiently to achieve the present publishing standards, and to the members of the Editorial and Advisory Boards, whose expertise and constructive criticism are crucial to bring such an ambitious and exciting enterprise to fruition. The field of Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP), both professional and academic, has undergone rapid and substantial changes over the last two decades, as new technological affordances and social needs have emerged and, alongside these, new communicative habits and phenomena, discourses, genres, intended audiences, theoretical frameworks, methodologies, subdisciplines, and research areas demanding interdisciplinary and intercultural perspectives that inspire innovative pedagogies. The speed at which these changes have happened in the past few years, together with the ensuing diversification and specialization within Applied Linguistics, make it necessary, more than ever, that Ibérica attests to the dynamism inherent in the discipline, reflects these trends and others to come, and provides an active discussion forum for scholars and professionals alike. In this joint venture I will be accompanied by my colleagues and friends Dr. Begoña Belles Fortuño (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) and Dr. Ruth Breeze (Universidad de Navarra, Spain) in the Directive Team, and by a young group of committed Editorial Assistants: Lucía Bellés-Calvera (Universitat Jaume I), Sofía Brotóns Arnau and Dámaso Izquierdo Alegría (Universidad de Navarra), and Teresa Molés Cases (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain). To all of them I want to express my heartfelt thanks for their keen and quick response. I am also grateful to Dr. Ana Bocanegra Valle for her editorial legacy and personal support, and feel especially indebted to the previous Editor-in- chief, Dr. Carmen Pérez-Llantada Auría, and the whole of her team (Dr. ibérica 36 (2018): 9-14 iSSN: 1139-7241 / e-iSSN: 2340-2784 9 00 IBERICA 36_01 Editorial.qxd 26/10/18 20:17 Página 9 Concepción Orna Montesinos, Dr. Ignacio Guillén Galve, Dr. Oana Maria Carciu and Dr. Diana Giner Alonso) for their encouragement and generosity in the almost complete management of this issue, their advice, and their involvement to ensure a smooth transition. This fall issue brings us a multilingual collection of eight articles that embody the international spirit of the journal and showcase important directions in the LSP discipline: Multimodality, Cognitive Linguistics, Terminology, Corpus Linguistics in its rhetorical and variationist approaches, Genre Analysis, and Language-across-the-Curriculum Pedagogy. The opening article, CHRISTOPH HAFNER’s guest contribution, explores the features, communicative context, generic structure and semiotic innovations of the video methods article (VMA), a multimodal genre gaining ground in the dissemination of experimental research since the early 2000s. From a multi-perspective approach to Genre Analysis and drawing on mixed methods, Hafner establishes connections with other digital research genres, highlights the hybrid nature of VMAs and their role as engagement devices and enhancers of discoursal identity, and points to the need for training in visual design as part of ESP and EAP education. In the next contribution, DOROTA SYLWIA MAJEWICZ and JACEK MAŚLANKOWSKI examine the role of metaphor in cross-cultural computer-mediated communication. Through big data technologies and text mining they analyse English and Polish metaphorical instances from Internet forums on the use of mobile phones, and conclude that metaphor coinage increases in culturally and linguistically heterogeneous environments, where the use of figurative language fulfils key cognitive functions. Metaphor is viewed from a different angle in the translation-oriented study authored by CARMEN MATEO GALLEGO and GUADALUPE RUIZ YEPES. These scholars delve into the typology and function of metaphors in the institutional discourse of the International Monetary Fund’s reports in the particular context of the world economic crisis. Their comparison of English source texts with their Spanish and German versions reveals a need to optimise the existing translation strategies. The following article focuses on the phenomenon of explicit terminological variation in the domain of Brazilian lexicography. Its authors, LUCIMARA ALVES COSTA and SABELA FERNÁNDEZ-SILVA, start out from modern cognitive-based terminology theories that regard term variation as intrinsic to specialized communication, and go on to consider cognitive and EDITORIAL ibérica 36 (2018): 9-1410 00 IBERICA 36_01 Editorial.qxd 26/10/18 20:17 Página 10 contextual factors such as chronological evolution, specialization, or viewpoint, as well as their potential cognitive repercussions. They finally propose a lexicographic representation of such multidimensional variation in a terminological resource traditionally underrepresented and deemed prescriptive: the specialized lexicography dictionary for learners. A further revisit to conceptual metaphor is offered by GRACIA PIÑERO PIÑERO, now in the professional arena of political discourse and drawing on the blended theoretical frameworks of Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, which fruitfully complement each other. The source domain under study, deeply influenced by cultural and mental individual models, is that of THEATRE AND SPECTACLE, given its prominent recourse for delegitimizing public figures through the focalization of deception, pretence and imitation, and its bi-functional role as coherence device and narrative motif conveying negative emotion. Through qualitative and quantitative methods, ARACELI CRISTOBALENA then looks into the ‘architexture’ (i.e. the macro- and micro-rhetorical structure of a given text and its typical use of language) of instruction manuals for household appliances in British English and Peninsular Spanish. Her findings evince a sort of hybrid style with characteristics of the scientific-technical and commercial registers across the two languages, although each foregrounds a different aspect of content: the British English samples appear to stress safety above any other feature, whereas the Peninsular Spanish ones tend to prioritise environmental impact through recycling. One more contrastive study integrates the wide array of topics contained in this issue: MARÍA-JOSÉ LUZÓN’s research on reporting verb variation in the citation practices of English-medium research articles. Samples written by Anglophone scholars are compared with others from contexts where English is an additional language, with the purpose of detecting divergences in use patterns and investigating their degree of acceptance in international publications. According to her results, the major usage differences between the two corpora concern the type of verbs (i.e. discourse, research, mental), their variety, and the frequency of certain types, and bilingual literacy and conformity to genre conventions seem to condition the patterns displayed by non-Anglophone writers. The final research contribution to this issue reports on the design and implementation of an advanced course on Spanish for the sciences in a EDITORIAL ibérica 36 (2018): 9-14 11 00 IBERICA 36_01 Editorial.qxd 26/10/18 20:17 Página 11 STEM (i.e. Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) college environment in the USA, with a focus on public dissemination and scholarly communication and based upon the Language across the Curriculum (LAC) model. ÓSCAR A. PÉREZ describes the learning scenario and the advantageous pedagogical impact of this initiative, which allows students to become responsible for their learning process and take on the role of facilitators, develop technical and soft skills, inter-relate notions and languages, question culturally-biased social conceptions of ‘science’, and take part in Spanish-speaking scientific circles. The book reviews compiled here are no less stimulating and representative of today’s tendencies in LSP. In the first of them, MERCEDES QUEROL JULIÁN reviews Certainty and Doubt in Academic Discourse: Epistemic Modality Markers in English and Polish Linguistics Articles, by Krystyna Warchał, a volume that promises to be extremely useful for Polish academics and students disseminating their research in English as a lingua franca, linguists specialising in (epistemic) modality, and writing instructors, due to its cross- cultural and cross-linguistic approach, its contextualised examples, and its overview of linguistic modality and academic discourse. ELISA GIRONZETTI evaluates Escribir a través del currículum. Una guía de referencia, coedited by Bazerman et al., a translation into Spanish of the original Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum (2005) and contextualised for Latin American educational settings. It amply meets its goal of divulgating the WAC (Writing across the Curriculum) movement and generating debate, and its translations afford plenty of footnotes that enrich the English version. Overall, this work is likewise of unquestionable usefulness for course designers, language and content teachers, postgraduates, and educational managers. Following, VICENT BELTRÁN-PALANQUES assesses Medical Discourse in Professional, Academic and Popular Settings, coedited by Pilar Ordóñez-López and Nuria Edo-Marzá. This book not only brings workplace research to the fore and informs about the traits and scenarios of the discourse of doctors and caregivers, but also helps us gain insights into how such discourse is constructed and addresses a much broader audience seldom taken into account by traditional research on this kind of specialised discourse: patients, interdisciplinary professionals and the general public. These three social groups receive, process and evaluate the discourse of health workers, which along this book’s chapters is scrutinized from a myriad of captivating EDITORIAL ibérica 36 (2018): 9-1412 00 IBERICA 36_01 Editorial.qxd 26/10/18 20:17 Página 12 standpoints and approaches. They comprise its evolution towards interactivity, metaphor use across genres and in the discourse of mindfulness, contrasts between expert and lay genres, the cultural and conceptual asymmetries between experts and discipline outsiders, stylistic adequacy, identity construction through medical narratives, and the relationship between writer affiliation and rhetorical positioning. The fourth and last review, by MIRELA BARDI, underlines the critical sociopragmatic spin of the work coedited by María Ángeles Orts Llopis, Ruth Breeze and Maurizio Gotti, entitled Power, Persuasion and Manipulation in Specialised Genres: Providing Keys to the Rhetoric of Professional Communities. It merges Genre Theory and the contextual and linguistic study of disciplinary cultures and specialised languages to dissect the social reality, with respect to the phenomena of manipulation and persuasion, pictured by professional discourses. (De)legitimisation and the expression and influences of communicative purpose, ideology and power cross-cut an extensive range of purposes (e.g. strictly informative, promotional, conflict-solving), discourses (e.g. institutional, organisational, disciplinary, of the mass media), genres (some as infrequent as surrogacy websites and aircraft-accident aviation dockets) and discursive phenomena (e.g. appropriation and hybridisation). I do not want to conclude this editorial without making grateful acknowledgement, also on behalf of the former editor-in-chief, to all the scholars who have collaborated in the peer-review process of the articles included in this issue. The in-house reviewers who have participated are, in alphabetical order, Rafael Alejo (Universidad de Extremadura, Spain), María Luisa Carrió (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain), Claus-Peter Neumann (Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain), and Lourdes Pomposo (Universidad Camilo José Cela, Spain). Also mentioned alphabetically, the external reviewers who devoted their knowledge and time to this fall issue are: Elisabet Arnó (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain) Mª Teresa Cabré (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) Emma Dafouz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) Marisa Díez Arroyo (Universidad de Oviedo, Spain) Mercedes Eurrutia (Universidad de Murcia, Spain) Inmaculada Fortanet (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) Maria Lluïsa Gea-Valor (Universitat de València, Spain) Sara Gesuato (Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy) EDITORIAL ibérica 36 (2018): 9-14 13 00 IBERICA 36_01 Editorial.qxd 26/10/18 20:17 Página 13 Joyce Kling (Københavens Universitet, Denmark) Mª Carmen Lario de Oñate (Universidad de Cádiz, Spain) David Lasagabaster (Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, Spain) Carmen López Ferrero (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain) María de la Nava Maroto (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain) Pedro Martín Martín (Universidad de La Laguna, Spain) José Joaquín Martínez Egido (Universidad de Alicante, Spain) Giovanni Parodi (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile) Giulia Adriana Pennisi (Università degli Studi di Palermo, Italy) Javier Pérez Guerra (Universidade de Vigo, Spain) Christine Räisänen (Chalmers Tekniska Högskola/Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden) Noelia Ruiz Madrid (Universitat Jaume I, Spain) Inmaculada Sanz Álava (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain) Gail Taillefer (Université Toulouse 1 Capitole, France) Shona Whyte (Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, France) Severine Wozniak (Université Grenoble Alpes, France) Last, but by no means least, I must give thankful recognition to the reviewers who have recently had to leave our Editorial Board after years of invaluable service: Elena Bárcena (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain), Rosa Giménez (Universitat de València, Spain) and Marisol Velasco (Universidad de Valladolid, Spain), and my warmest welcome to Cristina Calle (Universidad Camilo José Cela, Spain) and Carmen Pérez Sabater (Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain) as new members. I trust that scholars, practitioners, students and experts from any field interested in specialised communication will find this issue thought- provoking and discover in it inspiration to underpin their own research and professional routines. Carmen Sancho Guinda Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (Spain) iberica@aelfe.org Editor-in-chief of Ibérica EDITORIAL ibérica 36 (2018): 9-1414 00 IBERICA 36_01 Editorial.qxd 26/10/18 20:17 Página 14