The purpose is to describe spoken interaction as it occurs in Q/R sequences in genuine English talk. The strategic and formal realizations of question, response and follow-up are described and the extent to which syntactic, lexical and prosodic features correlate with certain exchange types is demonstrated. The point of departure is what a speaker intends to achieve at a particular point in discourse, how he does it is the second concern. The study is based on the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English.