Oldal 15 [15]
CHAPTER 1
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INTRODUCTION
According to Bhatt and Bolonyai “members of a discourse community of
practice [...] have common knowledge of ways of relating to each other, ways
of using their languages”!. In other words, the maximal interpretability of
communicative intentions hinges on a shared socio-cognitive reality against
which the meaning of communicative acts can be optimally interpreted. Code¬
switching as a communicative act also needs to be interpreted in a shared
socio-cognitive context, but the interplay between the socio-cognitive realities
that the codes being switched activate requires a more complex analysis.
It is a widely accepted concept in the literature that code-switching is a
natural and inherent component of bilingualism. Nevertheless, the ways of
approaching the complexity of code-switching have been various. The two
main perspectives of understanding the mechanism of code-switching have
been the structural and functional ones. The functional approach focuses on
how code-switching as a discursive act fulfils its meaning-making function in
a given context. Within the functional approach, in line with the philosophical
polarity regarding the essentialist and constructivist interpretation of
‘meaning’, there has been an ongoing discussion vis-a-vis the interpretability
of the functional meaning of code-switching. Relying primarily on Auer’s
conversation analysis theoretical approach’ some theorists claim that code¬
switching per se can be interpreted as a meaningful act and should be analyzed
in its micro, interactional-conversational context. Other theorists, however,
relying primarily on Myers-Scotton’s markedness model* claim that code¬
Rakesh M. Bhatt — Agnes Bolonyai, Code-switching and the optimal grammar of bilingual
use Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(4), 2011, 524
Peter Auer, Bilingual Conversation, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing
company, 1984; Peter Auer, A conversation analytic approach to code-switching and transfer,
in: Monica Heller (ed.), Code-switching, Anthropological and Sociolinguistic Perspectives,
Berlin, New York, Amsterdam, Mouton de Gruyter, 1988, 187-213; Peter Auer, Introduction.
Bilingual conversation revisited, in: Peter Auer (ed.) Code-switching in Conversation, London
and New York, Routledge, 1998, 1-24
Carol Myers-Scotton, Ihe negotiation of identities in conversation: A theory of markedness
+13 +