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Reconnecting Form and Meaning: In honour of Kristin Davidse
Edited by Caroline Gentens, Lobke Ghesquière, William B. McGregor and An Van linden
[Studies in Language Companion Series 230] 2023
► pp. 99–122

Chapter 4
On the rise of a marker of disaffiliation from Others’ discourse

| Stanford University
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.
Keywords: constructionalization, disaffiliation, discourse marker combination, pejorative expressive, reported speech enactment
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The theoretical approaches adopted
    • 2.1The model of Construction Grammar
    • 2.2The Diachronic Construction Grammar perspective
    • 2.3The approach to reported speech adopted
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.The development of OBTW
    • 4.1The rise of OBTW1 uses
    • 4.2The rise of OBTW2 uses
  • 5.Discussion
    • 5.1OBTW2 as an expressive
    • 5.2OBTW2 and mimicry
    • 5.3Reported speech and OBTW1 and OBTW2
  • 6.Is OBTW coming to be constructionalized?
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Corpora
  • References
Published online: 10 February 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.230.04tra
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Corpora
CLMET_3.0. The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts, version 3.0, 1710–1720. Compiled by Hendrik De Smet, Hans-Jürgen Diller & Jukka Tyrkkö. c.34 million words.
COCA. The Corpus of Contemporary American English. 1990–2019, version 2020. Compiled by Mark Davies. <[URL]>. Over a billion words.
COHA. Corpus of Historical American English. 1820–2019, version 2021. Compiled by Mark Davies. <[URL]>. c.400 million words.
EEBO. Early English Books Online. 1470s to 1690s. Online corpus created as part of the SAMUELS PROJECT (2014–2016). c.755 million words.Google Scholar
TIME. Time Magazine Corpus. 2007–. Compiled by Mark Davies. <[URL]>. c.100 million words.
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