“This is the linguist in me speaking”: Constructions to talk about the self talking

When a speaker makes an utterance that comments on herself, she is doing more than simply making a reflective statement about herself. She is drawing attention to a part of her self that she deems relevant to the current exchange by objectifying that part of her self. As it happens, meta-discoursal self-evaluative statements are often made by a speaker about what she has just said or is about to say in the ongoing discourse. Based on a model that sees the self as a conglomeration of all the narratives constituting a person’s experiences, and in all of which the person occupies the role of the protagonist, this paper investigates three meta-discoursal constructions which refer to facets of the self, and their pragma-semantic function of distancing in discourse. These are the ‘my N V-ing’, the ‘N in me’, and the ‘N in me V’ constructions, as exemplified respectively by That was my arrogance speaking, That’s the purist in me talking, and The cynic in me would say yes.