Phraseology and Culture in English

2. Material 
Answering machine communication needs no detailed presentation. The 
machine is designed for use on the telephone when the intended recipient is 
not there and the communication is therefore delayed. The person leaving 
the message responds to a pretaped message which can also contain instruc-
tions to the caller how to answer; the message is addressed to the recipient 
of the telephone call but the structure and the content of the message are 
constrained by the fact that the recipient is not able to give immediate feed-
back. My material consists of only the caller’s messages (cf. Liddicoat 1994 
who studies both messages from the caller and the recorded message left by 
the answerer). 
The messages which comprise my material were recorded at different 
times and it is therefore possible to make comparisons between them. The 
earliest messages (57 messages in all) are part of the London-Lund Cor-
pus (LLC) and were recorded in the 1970s on institutional answering 
machines. The callers are mainly administrators, secretaries and profes-
sors. In the 1970s the answering machine was a comparatively new tech-
nical invention which was used above all in offices and commercial insti-
tutions.
More recent material has been used for comparison and consists of 70 
messages recorded in the 1990s by university department answering ma-
chines in the UK (Surrey). In the 1990s the telephone answering machine 
was no longer a novelty: answering machines were used not only for busi-
ness purposes but people started having them in their homes and therefore 
had more experience of them. 

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Karin Aijmer 
The messages in both corpora were usually simple (consisting of a sin-
gle message), typically asking the other person to ring back. Other topics 
are settling bills, cancelling appointments, making arrangements to see stu-
dents. In the Surrey material there were also messages from commercial 
institutions (travel agencies, local firms, etc.) and topics also concern courses 
and accommodation for students.