Análisis contrastivo y cortesía. '¿El cómo se dice algo es más importante que lo que se dice?

Politeness is considered to be a basic orientation in social relationships, it constitutes a significant feature of human behaviour and is connected to a variety of aspects of communication, e.g. gestures and kinesic aspects. It characterizes communication in the modernity. Communication is interactionally achieved through the joint activity of participants. Being an interactional, communicative activity, politeness is jointly achieved through verbal and non verbal actions. It is worked out as a communication strategy. In this paper, we analyse telephone conversation openings in Italian and Spanish looking at the conversational routines that are enacted in this type of talk. Interactional routines are of particular interest in teaching Spanish as a foreign language as they include register choices, appropriateness and familiarity with cultural features characterizing the Spanish and Italian language community. The ultimate goal of this contrastive analysis is to highlight those features of interaction that may enable Italian students of Spanish as a foreign language to manage possibly different conversational routines and politeness strategies in telephone calls.