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The great increase that in the last decades have experienced pragmatic studies has generated a special attention to the so called rhetorical questions. Nevertheless, many times this kind of analysis is founded on artificially created ad hoc examples in such a manner that to a certain extent final results are conditioned by the methods. In this paper we have tried to paliate these deficiencies by improving three basic subjects: 1) we do not start from a previous intuitive prototipical Knowledge of the rhetorical question, on the contrary, we basically look for its limits; 2) we obtain the occurrences from dramatic texts, so every sentence appears in a proper manner with its complete pragmatic-intentional context; 3) as a result of 1 and 2 we can define the most important features of the «rhetorical cycle» implied in this construction and its variations in order to establish the communicative profiles of the rhetorical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]