This article aims to highlight the main syntactic features of a political text genre: parliamentary written questions. The investigation has been carried out on three small ad hoc corpora in German language: the first one consisting of questions addressed by members of the German Bundestag to the German Government, the other two of original and translated questions submitted by MEPs and mainly addressed to the Commission. The specific goals of the paper are twofold: first of all, to ascertain whether the syntax of this genre shows any variation linked to the particular institutional context (national vs. supranational parliament) and the corresponding discursive practices; secondly, to find out whether the syntax of the translated questions shows instances of translationese, e.g. is influenced by the source language or by the translation process.
