Phraseology and Culture in English

Idiomaticity in a cultural and activity type 
perspective:
The conventionalization of routine phrases in 
answering-machine messages 
Karin Aijmer 
1. Introduction 
In interaction we follow principles such as the Gricean maxims of conver-
sation and turn-taking rules. There are also rules which are specific to par-
ticular activities or text types. Sometimes the utterance itself can carry with 
it a link or association with a particular activity. In that case there is an 
indexical link between a phrase and a particular event or function such as 
identifying the caller leaving the message on the answering machine. For 
example, when we encounter a phrase such as this is /name/ we know not 
only that it is used for identification but that it has something to do with 
telephone calls or with telephone answering machine messages. In this case 
there is a close link not only between the phrase and the function of self-
identification but with a particular medium and a speech event. With other 
phrases the association is less fixed. For example, there might be a link 
between thank you and closing a discussion, conversation, etc., but thank
you is also used to express gratitude and is then used in many types of texts. 
Moreover we begin a face-to-face conversation differently from a telephone 
conversation indicating that speakers know what to say in a particular situa-
tion and that events come in a particular order. In this article I want to try 
out some ideas about how such phrases come into existence as useful 
strategies and later become routinized and linked to a particular activity. 
Phrases such as thank you or this is /name/ (‘routine phrases’) have a fairly 
fixed form and bring up the question why and how we get routinization in 
language.
Many text types have a formulaic nature. Kuiper (1996) has for instance 
studied the speech of auctioneers and sports commentators and their use of 
formulae (routines). The aim of my paper is to describe the use of routine 
phrases used by callers leaving messages on answering machines. Routine 
phrases have been studied from many different perspectives. By investigat-

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Karin Aijmer 
ing routines in a text type which is still new we can learn something about 
the meaning of routine phrases and the factors constraining their interpreta-
tion. Writers within ethnography of communication (Hymes 1972; see also 
Schiffrin 1994, chapter 5) have drawn our attention to the importance of 
cultural and social scripts, the ‘blue prints’ representing our knowledge of 
when, how and why we use language. I will show in the present paper that 
routine phrases need to be explained in terms of contextual issues such as 
the institution within which they are used, social activity (participants, set-
ting, etc.), the constraints imposed by the medium and people’s attitudes to 
mediated talk. 
Messages on the answering machine represent a unique type of talk con-
strained by the medium and the conditions under which the communication 
takes place. They are characterised by a restricted number of acts (events) 
in a pre-determined order: you should, for example, identify yourself (by 
name or by telephone number) before leaving a message. The message can 
also contain acts which are less predictable and fulfil the function of social 
padding.
The users’ conceptions about the answering machine may affect the 
form of the message. The fact that the intended recipient of the message 
does not share the same communicative space as the caller may result in 
more formality and indirectness than is common in telephone conversation. 
Conceptual conventions (cf. Clark 1996: 343f for this term) differ depend-
ing on whether the caller knows the recipient of the message or not and 
may change over time as the medium becomes more familiar. 
The answering machine is a fairly new medium and it is possible to 
make comparisons between messages when the medium was new and mes-
sages recorded more recently. Messages on the answering machine can be 
expected to use different conversational routines and conventional patterns 
because of the constraints imposed by the medium (cf. Liddicoat et al. 1992). 
Messages on the answering machine can also be compared with restricted 
languages intended for special purposes. Seaspeak is, for example, specially 
designed for maritime radio communication. It has a fixed format and spe-
cial routine phrases which can be explained by the constraints imposed by 
the context of use (poor radio reception, the importance of the message) 
(Strevens and Weeks 1985). 
Conversational routines on the answering machine are difficult to de-
scribe because of their variability. After a section dealing with the mate-
rial (Section 2), I will discuss some properties of leaving messages on the 
answering machine and look at some previous work (Section 3). In Sec-

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Idiomaticity in a cultural and activity type perspective
325
tion 4 I will deal with conversational routines on the answering machine 
in terms of the situational frames they must be associated with. In Section 
5, it is argued that messages must be represented as ‘stems’ since their 
form can vary systematically. Section 6 discusses conversational routines 
and theories of meaning. In Section 7 I discuss the conventional forms 
used to perform different functions on the answering machine. A com-
parison will be made with conventional forms in other text types. I will 
also compare messages recorded at different periods but otherwise similar 
to each other. The concluding Section 8 contains a discussion about the 
development and conventionalisation of routine phrases on the answering 
machine.