Edited by Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière, William B. McGregor and An Van linden
[Studies in Language Companion Series 230] 2023
► pp. 99–122
The discourse marker combination Oh, by the way is typically used to signal “digressive” discourse management and topic-shift from discourse 1 to content in discourse 2. I discuss how the combination came to be conventionalized as a hedge on a potentially face-threatening utterance (OBTW1), as attested in COHA from the 1840s. From the 1920s it could be used as a marker that signals the speaker’s strong disalignment with and mockery of something said by a third person “Other” (OBTW2). This study contributes to work on reported speech enactment. Links to pejorative expressives and echoic mockery are suggested. It is proposed that OBTW1 and OBTW2 are coming to be constructionalized as a new construction with variants. This construction is independent of its source in a discourse marker combination.