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This paper aims to reach a better understanding of the relationship between polite strategies and the phonic features displayed to express them. To do this, an oral corpus has been collected comprising interventions of academic committees (PhD and master theses). From this corpus, a set of fragments were analysed, namely countervailing positive fragments included in negative blocks and negative fragments embedded in positive blocks. The expected phonic behaviour is an increased phonic prominence in the former case and a decrease in the latter one. Despite this tendency being satisfied in most cases, however, a percentage of the examples do not follow this expected behaviour, where the tendency towards (lack of) phonic prominence is inverted. When comparing the phonic data with the degree of planning, it can be seen that abnormal results do frequently appear in interventions with a high degree of planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]