This study investigates timing of communicative behaviour with respect to speaker’s respiratory cycle. The data is drawn from a corpus of multiparty conversations in Swedish. We find that while longer utterances (> 1 s) are tied, predictably, primarily to exhalation onset, shorter vocalisations are spread more uni- formly across the respiratory cycle. In addition, nods, which are free from any respiratory constraints, are most frequently found around exhalation offsets, where respiratory requirements for even a short utterance are not satisfied. We interpret the results to reflect the economy principle in speech production, whereby respiratory effort, associated primarily with starting a new respiratory cycle, is minimised within the scope of speaker’s communicative goals.