The present comparative parallel corpus study of Russian and Swedish polar response particles shows that Swedish displays a highly polarity dependent answering system whereas Russian vacillates between an agreement/disagreement system and a polarity system and also uses echo responses to some degree. It is shown that aligning responses in Swedish always match the polarity of the prior turn. In most cases the Swedish response particles agree in polarity with the following proposition but this tendency is not decisive in the polarity assignment of response particles. In discourse marking functions the polarity of the response particles becomes less apparent.