'Are these ones to taste?' : critical moments in Persian shops in Sydney

This article aims to examine potential and actual ‘critical moments’ that have occurred in one of the Persian ethnic shops in Sydney with the pseudonym, Persia, that had a bearing on the participants’ social inter¬actions. Specifically, this paper explores how service interactions occur in a site of engagement at a nexus of some aggregate of discourse in real time and space. Such discourse itineraries, R. Scollon (2008) argues, are always mediated by text, action and the material world, for ‘the rela¬tionship of text to text, language to language, is not a direct relationship but is always mediated by the actions of social actors as well as through material objects of the world’ (p. 223). Hence, bringing language use into its social context has an important contribution in casting light on how a social space like Persian ethnic shops, for instance, is replete with cultural-social meaning.