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In this paper we analyze, as an example of oral political discourse, the songs of two main Spanish politics parties, during the general 2008 elections. As other texts of political discourse (such as speech, interviews, meetings, posters, advertisings, etc.), these songs that accompanied the electoral propaganda are part of a public and ideological discourse aimed at the election of a candidate (perlocutive object). The elector voting for the candidate must believe that he is the best option available. Thus, the candidate's discourse is directed so the elector knows that the candidate and his party are the best options (legitimation), while it presents the opposing candidate as the worst one (delegitimation). The results of the analysis show that these strategies, quite typical in political discourse, have some new elements such as their resemblance to commercial advertising, i.e. the testimonials by famous people. Even if the political songs are a traditional genre with conventional communicative aims (propaganda and persuasion), they display some typical features in contemporary and postmodern communication: colloquiality, informality, "carnivalization", syncretism and hibridation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of a research project on the dialogal genres of political discourse including parliamentarian debates. My aim, in this context, is to study the illocutionary modalities used by each MP in several subgenres of the Spanish parliamentary discourse on 'University' as a topic. The corpora are constituted by all discussions that took place between the first parliamentary session with José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero as President of Spain (16th of April 2004) and the end of the 8th legislature in 2007. I focus on the illocutionary modalities with dominance of the deontic type (suggestion, need, duty), which should show the range of aspirations that the different parties represented in the Spanish camera have for the Spanish university. Because the wishes and goals expressed by the MPs arise from their knowledge of reality or, to be more precise, from the representation that the different groups have of reality, these modalities are supported in epistemic modalities either implicitly or explicitly. I conclude by describing (i) the current perception that the citizens' representatives have of the University and the objectives for its future development, and (ii) the specific way in which each parliamentary group addresses this topic, which is manifested in the discourse of the different speakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work offers a discursive analysis of questions in face to face political debates. From a corpus of five debates held in Spain during the General Elections of 1993 and 2008, the author analyses a wide range of question types which differ from other speech genres both from a quality and quantity standpoint. Next to questions meant by the speaker to get a reply and obtain information from his/her interlocutor, there are others that don't follow that pattern. However, among the latter we should distinguish between traditional rhetorical questions which do not need reply and others of a mixed nature since they share some characteristics of both types. On the one hand, just like rhetorical questions, they don't look for the interlocutor's response but, unlike diese ones, they follow the usual search for information of standard questions. Their peculiarity lies on the fact that this information is provided by the speaker and not by the opponent. At die same time, institutional constraints of these debates are such that die answer is not meant to solve the cognitive gap of the speaker or the interlocutor, but that of the audience, die final target of the politicians' messages in electoral campaigns. In addition to the interactional and informational analysis, the article reviews other functions of the referred and other questions, both at argumentative and interpersonal levels, as well as the influence of various contextual factors that help to explain die varied distribution of these utterances in the corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this work I will look at conversational data collected in a water company in Galicia. The interactions will be analysed as processes related to the reproduction of institutional order, and also linked to processes of social change. In this sense, I will show how the interactions reflect, and built, in the particular situation, the "normal" democratic order, where citizens have rights and duties. On the other side, I will explain how communicative processes enact social change, and reflect the activation of different interpretative frames and power relations. Consequently, it is shown that a complex link exists between communicative processes and institutional processes. From a methodological point of view, I will emphasize the complexity of the relations between the interactional order and the institutional order, and will stress that the understanding of microsocial processes contribute to the understanding of macrosocial processes, and vice-versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]