Promotion of Self in an Other-Oriented Academic Sub-Genre: The evolutionary study of Self-mentionin Acknowledgments (1985-2013)

Although sometimes considered to act only as a means of recognizing debts, acknowledgments give the opportunity for writers to display a self-conscious and reflective representation of self. Following this assumption to reveal some of the ways this is achieved, a corpus of 40 textbook acknowledgments in the field of linguistics and applied linguistics were analyzed in order to show what “self” does in an other-oriented academic sub-genre over time. The findings of the study revealed that acknowledgment is composed of a sequence of moves through which the writer must mainly and primarily acknowledge the others who have a share in the process of the development of an academic enterprise. However, within this manifest presence of others we also find implicit and explicit traces of self which carry the writers’ desires for promotion. Furthermore, the constant evolutionary behavior of promoting self-mentions in old and new acknowledgments within specified period of 30 years could be justified by the fact that self promotion and academic recognition have become an inherent quality of all academic writers regardless of the genre they are producing and even an “other” oriented academic genre can be seen to carry a self-promotional sense.