Abstract
This paper looks at the openings of telephone service encounters in bookshops taking a Conversation Analysis perspective. The participants involved are native speakers of English calling Italian bookshops. These calls are compared to two more sets of calls to bookshops, one involving only native speakers of Italian, the other one involving only native speakers of English. Qualitative and quantitative analysis are performed focussing particularly on the management of the initial (opening) turns in the encounters and on their sequential organization in terms of the production of moves such as summons/answer, identification, greetings, .how are you. and getting down to business (Schegloff 1986, Bercelli&Pallotti, 2002). Particular attention is paid to the turn management of requests and the type of pre-sequences used by speakers.