Fatemeh Asgari - Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English Language Teaching Shahreza Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahreza,Iran
Hossein Vahid Dastgerdi - Associate Professor, Department of English Language Teaching Shahreza Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahreza,Iran
Fatemeh Asgari - Associate Professor, Department of English Language Teaching Shahreza Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahreza,Iran
Omid Tabatabaei - Associate Professor, Department of English Language Teaching Shahreza Branch, Islamic Azad University, Shahreza,Iran

Politicians enter the political arena armed with the linguistic strategies peculiar to political discourse. Meticulouslyselected words are the weapons politicians draw upon whenever they want to defeat an adversary, persuade theirviewers, disguise disagreements, reconcile points of view, evade a direct answer, mitigate responsibility, garner theelectoral support and, generally, manipulate reality. Hedges and boosters, two subcategories of Meta discoursemarkers, are among the rhetorical tropes which assist politicians to increase or decrease commitment, blur or sharpenthe boundaries between good and evil, and bolster or emasculate solidarity. Despite the many functions hedges andboosters can play in political discourse, studies that address these devices in relation to their persuasive effect intelevised presidential debates cross linguistically are tremendously scant. To this aim, the current study examined thehedging and boosting strategies used by the winners of American and Iranian presidential elections during one of theirlatest televised debates. A bottom–up method of analysis was adopted to analyze the debates in terms of hedges andboosters. The study showed that there were not the frequencies significantly different tendencies towards using hedgesand boosters.

Hedges, Analysis, Presidential Debates