Stance has been used increasingly as an important theoretical and analytical term in the study of language and social interaction. Most importantly, it has been deployed as a way to make connections between macro-level social identities... more
Stance has been used increasingly as an important theoretical and analytical term in the study of language and social interaction. Most importantly, it has been deployed as a way to make connections between macro-level social identities and ideologies and what actually happens when people are talking to each other face to face. For all of this analytical success and fervor, stance is still a remarkably contested concept; it is still not clear that all researchers use the term in a similar way, and especially whether they agree on the linguistic resources a speaker can use to make a stance claim. In this paper I propose three main axes of stance and some linguistic resources for indicating these axes. While keeping in mind that stances are always negotiated and interactionally created in context, I propose three main axes: Alignment, affect, and investment. In order to demonstrate how these axes work, I consider how the word ‘just’ does alignment work in two conversations, considering how aspects of its contexts of use combine with its particular meaning and indexicalities to assert stance. I show how the single word modifies the three axes to differing degrees, and propose a heuristic for stance analysis.
Location of appropriate seats in seating areas of theaters remains a significant challenge that patrons of these enterprises face. There is therefore, the need for seat occupancy monitoring system to provide readily accessible seat... more
Location of appropriate seats in seating areas of theaters remains a significant challenge that patrons of these enterprises face. There is therefore, the need for seat occupancy monitoring system to provide readily accessible seat occupancy information to clients and management of these halls. This paper presents the design and implementation of a low cost seat occupancy detection and display system which is capable of monitoring seat occupancy in halls efficiently. The system uses capacitive seat sensors which is designed based on the loading mode technology. It detects the presence of a human occupant using a single electrode. Occupancy data is relayed to a WiFi-enabled microcontroller unit which processes the data and wirelessly transfers the processed data to a central base station over a local area network for graphical and numerical display. Commands are also transferred from the base station to the microcontroller units when needed. Theoretical and empirical results show th...
