  In meetings where important decisions get made, what items receive more
attention may influence the outcome. We examine how different types of
rhetorical (de-)emphasis -- including hedges, superlatives, and contrastive
conjunctions -- correlate with what gets revisited later, controlling for item
frequency and speaker. Our data consists of transcripts of recurring meetings
of the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee (FOMC), where important aspects
of U.S. monetary policy are decided on. Surprisingly, we find that words
appearing in the context of hedging, which is usually considered a way to
express uncertainty, are more likely to be repeated in subsequent meetings,
while strong emphasis indicated by superlatives has a slightly negative effect
on word recurrence in subsequent meetings. We also observe interesting patterns
in how these effects vary depending on social factors such as status and gender
of the speaker. For instance, the positive effects of hedging are more
pronounced for female speakers than for male speakers.
