Grammatical and prosodic means of human- and animal-oriented (pre-) directives of talk-in-interaction

This paper discusses closings considered as the most sensible parts of conversation. Closings must satisfy their major goal, namely to end up conversation, but at the same time, they should not violate any of the conversation maxims and should not cause social conflicts between the interlocutors. Closings are considered in a way ‘signals of face-saving strategies’. This paper provides evidence that institutional conversations differ from natural conversations, especially with regard to their closings, an aspect of structural property, which they may share with other structural properties of openings, but in a very special form and way - ending up conversation being their crucial and major invariant. The author claims that prosody does not only play a crucial role in order to mark cognitive semantic information (topic-focus articulation) but also to mark expressivity and politeness and to switch grammatical meanings of turning them to meanings of communicative senses. In addition to the communication between humans and humans, a special case is examined.