Advanced cancer patients’ construction of self during oncology consultations: a transitivity concordance analysis

Abstract This paper explores advanced cancer patients’ self-identification from a grammatical-concordance perspective. It combines corpus linguistics tool of concordance and transitivity analysis to investigate the grammatical choices that advanced cancer patients make to identify and construct themselves during an oncology consultation. The data comprises 69 oncology consultations between advanced cancer patients (and in some consultations a companion or companions) and their oncologist. Findings reveal that these advanced cancer patients identified themselves with an active and informed role in terms of self-care, decision-making and other administrative activities; they identified their everyday life as an indispensable part of the domain of medicine; and they did not associate themselves with emotive mental processes during the consultation.