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CHAPTER 1 —o> — 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. Codeswitching 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 codeswitching 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 codeRakesh 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 +
