'¿PERO QUE PREGUNTA ES ESA?': SOBRE LA NATURALEZA VARIABLE DE PREGUNTAS Y RESPUESTAS EN EL DEBATE POLÍTICO-ELECTORAL.

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]