This volume examines the way participants orient to aspects of their interactions with others as interpersonally sensitive across an array of languages and contemporary institutional settings. The individual chapters address interactional episodes where the participants signal that elements of the exchanges they are engaged in are problematic in terms of the vulnerability of their own and/or each other's face and the role-identities assumed throughout the interactions. 0The volume contributors examine a range of activities. In some of these, an orientation to interpersonal sensitivity is expected, such as citizens' encounters with traffic police officers, negotiations with a line manager, political news interviews, or public inquiries. Other types of activity, such as service calls or guided tours, involve no such expectations in and of themselves. In some cases, the situated vulnerabilities studied here, whether expected or not, lead to deviation from the expected trajectory of the communicative event, with implications for goal achievement.0The collection of papers draws on diverse analytic perspectives. These include interactional discourse analysis, interactional linguistics, and conversation analysis.

Introduction /Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Rosina Márquez Reiter -- Requests and counters in Russian traffic police officer-citizen encounters: face and identity implications / Rosina Márquez Reiter, Kristina Ganchenko and Anna Charalambidou -- Negotiating with the boss: an inter- and cross-cultural perspective on problematic talk / Lars Fant and Annika Denke -- Evading and resisting answering: an analysis of Mexican Spanish news interviews / Ariel Vázquez Carranza -- Apologies made at the Leveson inquiry: triggers and responses / James Murphy -- When questioners count on the recipients' lack of knowledge: a recurring "question-answer" format in guided tours / Anna Claudia Ticca and Véronique Traverso -- When routine calls for information become interpersonally sensitive / Sara Orthaber and Rosina Márquez Reiter -- Patterns of thanking in the closing section of UK service calls: marking conversational macro-structure vs managing interpersonal relations / Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen.