Phraseology and Culture in English

3. Leaving messages on the answering machine 
In a message left on an answering machine the speaker has a dialogue with 
an imagined or constructed recipient. Speakers can adopt an impersonal 
voice or they can choose to establish a social relation to the imagined par-
ticipant by means of speech. The situation differs from both telephone calls 
and face-to-face conversation and we can therefore expect different con-
ventions to come into existence. However, it takes time for new conven-
tions to develop and speakers therefore use a variety of different routines 
which have been shown to be useful in other situations such as telephone 
calls or face-to-face conversations. Experience in using the new medium is 
acquired by effort, practicing and training rather than in the socialisation 
process. As a result, the conventions and the routine phrases used to cope 
with problems in the communication situation may be more or less success-
ful (Dubin 1987). 
In the messages on the answering machine speakers apologise and say 
thank you without getting any response from a hearer, but they do not, for 
example, ask about the other person’s health (cf. how are you, how are you 
doing in face-to-face and in telephone conversation) (Liddicoat 1994). 
Greetings, confirming arrangements, making requests, asking for informa-
tion, marking the closing of the message are other acts which need to be 
carried out without feedback from the hearer. Messages usually include a 
request or a question as their main topic. However, there are few direct 
questions or requests and a request can have a fairly conventionalised indi-
rect form. 
In previous work on answering machine messages (Dingwall 1992, 1995; 
Gold 1991; Liddicoat 1994) the focus has been on how this text type differs 
from telephone calls and from letter writing. Dingwall (1992), for instance, 
compared letters, telephone calls and messages on the answering machine 
and showed how they could be placed on the spoken-written dimension. 
However, she was not concerned with the conventional linguistic forms 

---

Idiomaticity in a cultural and activity type perspective
327
used by speakers to perform different strategies and the extent to which 
these were the same as used in the same situations in other text types. 
Looking at routine phrases in a text type (speech event) can help us to 
understand something about routine phrases in general. Routine phrases are 
sometimes treated as uniquely associated with a particular meaning. How-
ever routine phrases may be homophonous both between functions and 
situational meanings (Kiefer 1996); for example thank you is used both to 
express gratitude and to signal closing. It is used as a closing signal in dis-
cussions, debates, business calls but not in face-to-face conversation. The 
link between a particular situation and conversational routines can also be 
weak. The callers can for instance choose between many different phrases 
to identify themselves on the answering machine.