Abstract
Taking as a departure point research on face-to-face conversation and telephone communication carried out within the perspective of pragmatics and Conversation Analysis, the paper focusses on answering machine-mediated communication (TAM-C). In particular, it analyses (Italian) private and (French and German) professional answering machine outgoing messages, with the goal of highlighting how callees, on the background of their competence fo telephone conversations, cope with the constraints imposed by the situational setting of TAM-C (mediated communication, lack of on-line interaction, callers' anonymity) in pursuing the constitutive purpose of keeping in contact with callers. Particular attention is thereby devoted to the analysis of callees' rhetorical strategies in terms of speech acts selection and locutory choices, and to intertextual and cultural regularities in the way speakers make use of the medium. Similarities and differences between private (symmetrical) and professional (asymmetrical) communication are also discussed, in terms of the ways in which the relationship between callee and caller is established and represented and as related to how other purposes than keeping-contact may play a role in the two types of answering-machine outgoing messages.