The question "Who am I? / What am I?" as a marker of identity search
... the data of the National Russian Corpus, it is shown that changes in the perception of the “I” in the 19th—20th centuries, described in philosophy, led to the emergence of rhetorical questions “Who am I? What am I?” in the language. This construction is distributed synchronously with the I-constructions I am I, I am not I, I am good, I am bad, etc.
Berger, P. and Lukman, T., 1995.
Sotsial'noe konstruirovanie real'nosti
[The Social Construction of Reality]. Moscow, 323 p. (in Russ....