Interrogatives in news discourse have been examined in linguistics and conversation analysis, but mostly in broadcast interviews and relatively small, often English-language corpora, while large-scale computational studies of news rarely distinguish interrogatives from declaratives or differentiate their functions. This paper brings these strands together through a mixed-methods study of the "Politics of Questions" in contemporary French-language digital news. Using over one million articles published between January 2023 and June 2024, we automatically detect interrogative stances, approximate their functional types, and locate textual answers when present, linking these quantitative measures to a qualitatively annotated subcorpus grounded in semantic and pragmatic theories of questions. Interrogatives are sparse but systematically patterned: they mainly introduce or organize issues, with most remaining cases being information-seeking or echo-like, while explicitly leading or tag questions are rare. Although their density and mix vary across outlets and topics, our heuristic suggests that questions are overwhelmingly taken up within the same article and usually linked to a subsequent answer-like span, most often in the journalist's narrative voice and less often through quoted speech. Interrogative contexts are densely populated with named individuals, organizations, and places, whereas publics and broad social groups are mentioned much less frequently, suggesting that interrogative discourse tends to foreground already prominent actors and places and thus exhibits strong personalization. We show how interrogative stance, textual uptake, and voice can be operationalized at corpus scale, and argue that combining computational methods with pragmatic and sociological perspectives can help account for how questioning practices structure contemporary news discourse.

翻译：新闻语篇中的疑问句已在语言学和会话分析中得到研究，但主要集中在广播访谈和相对较小、常为英语的语料库中，而大规模新闻计算研究很少区分疑问句与陈述句或区分其功能。本文通过混合方法研究当代法语数字新闻中的“问题政治”，将这些线索结合起来。利用2023年1月至2024年6月间发布的一百多万篇文章，我们自动检测疑问立场，近似其功能类型，并在存在时定位文本答案，将这些定量测量与基于疑问句语义和语用理论进行定性标注的子语料库相关联。疑问句稀疏但系统性地有规律：它们主要引入或组织议题，其余大部分为信息寻求或回声式疑问句，而明显的引导性或附加疑问句则很少见。尽管其密度和组合因媒体和主题而异，我们的启发式方法表明，问题绝大多数在同一篇文章内被采纳，并通常与后续类似答案的语段相关联，最常见于记者的叙述声音中，较少通过引语体现。疑问语境中密集出现具名个人、组织和地点，而公众和广泛社会群体被提及的频率则低得多，这表明疑问话语倾向于凸显已有的知名行动者和地点，从而表现出强烈的个性化特征。我们展示了如何在语料库规模上操作化疑问立场、文本采纳和声音，并论证将计算方法与语用学和社会学视角相结合，有助于解释提问实践如何构建当代新闻话语。