Say 'Thank You': Some Pragmatic Constraints in Conversational Closings

Research on intracultural and cross-cultural variation in the use and realization of particular speech acts has generally focused on situanonal parameters such as power, social distance, and degree of imposition (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) This paper argues that the use of thanks in closing conversations also reflects local concerns of conversational management, insofar as participants need to demonstrate their final alignment to a common frame of reference and a shared satisfactory role-relationship Analysis of naturally-occurring data from English and Italian service encounters suggests that cross-cultural differences in closings may be as much due to differences in the preferred procedures of conversational management as to differences in perceptions of the overall situation or in cultural ethos, arguing for a greater attention to such procedures in contrastive pragmatics and in foreign language pedalogy