Phraseology and Culture in English

Idiomaticity in a cultural and activity type perspective
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To sum up, we find a mixture of strategies borrowed from face-to-face 
interaction, telephone conversation and written messages in the identifica-
tion section. In the LLC corpus this is (name) was most frequent and it is 
(it’s) (name) did not occur at all (but compare it’s X here). Self-identifica-
tion was missing in 8 examples in the Surrey material indicating that the 
greeting phrase also served to identify the speaker implicitly as a voice 
sample. 
7.3. The caller’s message on the answering machine – requests and 
questions
Requests mainly occur in text types which are interactional. However re-
quests also occur on the answering machine although no immediate re-
sponse can be expected from the recipient. A request can be made in sev-
eral forms, depending on the text type, what one is asking for, etc. Fraser, 
for instance, distinguished 20 different forms in which a request can be 
made (reported by Walters 1981) and Aijmer (1996) discussed 18 different 
strategies.
On the telephone or the answering machine, certain types of requests are 
recurrent and therefore tend to occur in a special form. Typical telephone 
requests are asking to speak to another person, leaving a message, asking 
another person to ring back, to give only a few examples (Aijmer 1996: 
167; cf. Stenström 1984: 256). A recurrent request on the answering ma-
chine is ‘asking someone to call back’ and (less frequently) ‘asking to leave 
a message’. The speaker uses a stem with a modal auxiliary which can be 
further varied depending on face considerations. 
A
Can you 
Could you 
(possibly) VP (please) 
e.g. Could you please ring me back; Could you please telephone….; Could
you kindly ring me; Could you ring …; So perhaps you could telephone 
me to arrange another appointment; Could you ask James please to tele-
phone me straight away; Could you ring me and let me know; Please
could you ask X to ring back; Could you ask him if he would mind ring-
ing me

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338
Karin Aijmer 
If the stem is expanded, as in B, more politeness is expressed: 
B
I would be (ADV) grateful if
e.g. I would be grateful if you could give me a call; I would be most grate-
ful if X could phone this number; I would be very grateful if you could ring 
me back at this number; I would be most grateful if you come back whether 
you could possibly ring me before you leave tonight
C
if you (he) would mind (like to) VP 
if he would mind ringing me up; if you’d like to give me a ring 
D
(perhaps) you (he) would VP 
Perhaps you would give me a telephone call; Would he please ring me
E
I would like to ask NP to VP 
I would like to ask X to telephone me at home 
The stem can or could you is the recurrent element in many conventional-
ized requests on the answering machine such as asking another person to 
call back. It was often embedded in a higher clause in which the speaker 
expresses gratitude. 
Other requests on the answering machine are typically expanded by a 
clause in which the speaker downtones the imposition of the request: 
if 
I (just) wondered whether S 
when 
(5) and I wonder whether you could help me out and see whether you could 
track down who they just quoted order number ….(Surrey) 

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