The origin of this book was the workshop entitled ‘Questions and their responses’, hosted by the Multimodal Interaction Project at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, in March 2006. I wish to thank the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft for providing us with the funding for this workshop. Furthermore, I’d like to thank Nick Enfield, Steve Levinson, Tanya Stivers and the other colleagues in the Multimodal Interaction Project for their support in organizing this workshop.

I also wish to express my gratitude to Grainne Delany, Caro Kirchhof, Katharina Wendler and Claudia Wild for their indispensable assistance in proofreading, formatting and generally helping out during the editing and submission of this book.

Also, many thanks to the authors, who have graciously accepted many delays and numerous expected and unexpected requests with good humour.

Finally, I wish to thank Helen Barton of Cambridge University Press for her professionalism and patience in supporting us in the socially and organizationally complex process of editing a scientific volume.