Wondering about the intersection of speech acts, politeness and deixis: I wondered and I was wondering in the BNC

This paper presents a corpus-linguistic case study on the usage of Attitudinal Past in spoken communication. As representatives of the phenomenon, the two forms ‘I wondered’ and ‘I was wondering’ were selected. The aim is twofold: the first aim is to discuss frequent collocations, to analyse grammatical and structural features and to examine discourse factors governing the use of Attitudinal Past as evidenced in the British National Corpus. The second aim is to investigate the phenomenon of Attitudinal Past with respect to the theories of politeness, deixis and emotive communication, considering both the speaker’s motivation to use it and its effect on the hearer. It is argued that Attitudinal Past is poorly understood if described solely as a grammatical structure. Its potential to give proof of the connection between deixis and politeness needs yet to be realized. In the concluding section, the main findings are summarized and some implications of Attitudinal Past as a phenomenon at the crossroads of deixis and politeness are considered.