"Te:mos o serra cura::do, temos o ni:sa, temos o serpa do:p." Suggesting products to buy, shaping materiality and multisensoriality in shop encounters

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.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. &nbsp

Exact Recovery for a Family of Community-Detection Generative Models

Generative models for networks with communities have been studied extensively for being a fertile ground to establish information-theoretic and computational thresholds. In this paper we propose a new toy model for planted generative models called planted Random Energy Model (REM), inspired by Derrida's REM. For this model we provide the asymptotic behaviour of the probability of error for the maximum likelihood estimator and hence the exact recovery threshold. As an application, we further consider the 2 non-equally sized community Weighted Stochastic Block Model (2-WSBM) on $h$-uniform hypergraphs, that is equivalent to the P-REM on both sides of the spectrum, for high and low edge cardinality $h$. We provide upper and lower bounds for the exact recoverability for any $h$, mapping these problems to the aforementioned P-REM. To the best of our knowledge these are the first consistency results for the 2-WSBM on graphs and on hypergraphs with non-equally sized community

Narrative Structure and Characters in the Nanzi Stories of Curacao: a Discourse Analysis.

This dissertation develops a new approach to the analysis of narratives by combining the analysis of narrative structure and character analysis. Through the in-depth analysis of two stories of a collection of 32 Nanzi stories (from Curacao), which are spider/trickster stories in Papiamentu, I develop a method to analyze the structure of the Nanzi stories. My method is based on the determination of narrative division into (1) episodes, organized as macro-propositions under a macro-structure (Van Dijk 1982; 1992); (2) different sections (six), based on narrative and free clauses (Labov 1972); and, (3) major events (Barthes 1975; Chatman 1978). By applying several theories of character analysis to one of my sample stories: Hasan\u27s -er/ed roles (1989), combined with Halliday\u27s process analysis (1997); narration and focalization (Bal 1991); interrelationship of characters (King 1992), I demonstrate (1) how an all-round image of human-like characters is created in the Nanzi story; (2) why the characters in the Nanzi story convey such a vivid impression to the reader