This book is the third volume of the series "Studies on Oral Discourse" by the Institute of Modern Greek Studies (IMS) and is dedicated to a fundamental component of linguistic interaction, responsiveness. It consists of pragmatically oriented research focusing on various aspects of questions and answers in everyday speech (mainly in conversations or telephone conversations between familiar individuals, in Part II) or their use in institutional communication contexts (in television interviews/discussions and in the teaching process, in Part III). Their main aim is to shed light on the functions of responsiveness in relation to their form and structure, answering questions such as: how is the answer influenced by the design of the question (its morphosyntactic, prosodic, etc. characteristics), what is the role of responsiveness in specific text genres (e.g. narration) or activities (e.g. evaluation), what are their interactive consequences and what are the effects of the extralinguistic contextual framework on the question-answer sequence.

The papers published here contribute to recent international research on the issue of actions performed with a question and the conditions of their differentiation. This research has been conducted in recent years mainly from the perspective of Conversation Analysis, which conceptually perceives the core pair of question-answer (and language use in general) as a social activity, connecting it with the unequal distribution of knowledge among interlocutors and its management in communication. The theoretical assumptions, central issues, and main findings of relevant research are examined by the specialist in the field of responsiveness, Professor M.-L. Sorjonen, in the introductory article of the volume (Part I).