Abstract
Adopting the perspective of multimodal conversation analysis, the paper shows the methodic organization of an action, making suggestions, achieved by sellers in response to customers’ requests for recommendations in shop encounters, and involving the showing and listing of available products. This focus on a specific sequential environment and institutional ecology, enables an exemplary discussion of how this action is multimodally formatted, embedded in its context, and shaped in relation to objects as discursive referents as well as materialities to be pointed at, looked at, touched and sensed in multiple ways. More generally, this focus enables to address two sets of issues: on the one hand, it elucidates the nexus between action, institutionality and materiality, including the role of multisensoriality in engaging with the qualities of buyable objects. On the other hand, it addresses the nexus between action and referential practices for introducing and presenting new referents, within an interactional perspective locating these grammatical practices and their systematic features within their praxeological context. On the basis of video data recorded in a gourmet shop in Lisbon, Portugal, this double focus targets issues of sensoriality and socialization in food culture, as well as issues of grammar in interaction, casting some light on situated uses of the verb ter for introducing new referents. Keywords: Social Interaction; Shop Encounters; Multimodality and Multisensoriality.
Highlights
Confronted with a large array of possible choices of specialized products, customers visiting a shop encounter the practical problem of how to select the items to buy
On the basis of video data recorded in a gourmet shop in Lisbon, Portugal, and within the perspective of multimodal conversation analysis, the paper discusses issues of reference and grammar, talk and embodiment, materiality and multisensoriality, by considering them within a particular action: making suggestions
By focusing on how objects are introduced and presented in a situated activity, and in a specific sequential and praxeological environment, in which the material and sensorial features of the objects matter, the paper casts light on emergent topics in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis related to materiality, multimodality, and multisensoriality, while at the same time contributing to the study of grammatical practices, considered in their situated multimodal usages and local ecology
Summary
Confronted with a large array of possible choices of specialized products, customers visiting a shop encounter the practical problem of how to select the items to buy. The seller produces suggestions, generally offering an array of possible buyable objects, and guiding the customers in their selection This situation represents a perspicuous setting for studying how within a particular action—here making suggestions—, objects can be presented and listed, formatted in a way that orients to the ongoing activity, its practical purposes, its participants, and its ecology. On the basis of video data recorded in a gourmet shop in Lisbon, Portugal, and within the perspective of multimodal conversation analysis, the paper discusses issues of reference and grammar, talk and embodiment, materiality and multisensoriality, by considering them within a particular action: making suggestions This locates multimodal grammatical practices for presenting new referents within a situated activity, which in turn shows how in economic encounters buyable products are presented and recommended, as well as how talk, the body, and the senses systematically feature in the offer, presentation and valuation of these products. On the basis of video data recorded in Lisbon, documenting shop encounters in Portuguese and specific grammatical practices in European Portuguese, the paper articulates different fields of inquiry that are often considered autonomously: situated actions, multimodal grammatical practices, material objects in their material ecology and socio-institutional contexts
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