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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]