Oldal 17 [17]
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION
Bhatt and Bolonyai" gathered all sociopragmatic functions emerging from
the literature on code-switching and classified them comprehensively as
the subfunctions of the five sociopragmatic principles acting as constraints.
These five violable and hierarchically conflicting constraints determine the
socio-cognitive mechanism of code-switching. Although the constraints are
universal, their ranking, which actually settles the order of the conflicting
constraints, is community specific and is constant in a given speech
community.
The ranking of the five constraints can be set up by observing the
sociopragmatic functions that the instances of code-switching fulfill in the
examined speech community, and representing these functions in algorithmic
tableaux. Adopting this method, Bhatt and Bolonyai® have set up a ranking of
constraints specific to a Hindi-Kashmiri-English trilingual speech community
in India and in a Hungarian-American bilingual immigrant community in
the USA.
The aim of the present study is to provide a qualitative analysis of the
applicability of the ranking of socio-cognitive constraints governing the socio¬
cognitive mechanism of code-switching, proposed by Bhatt and Bolonyai? in the
Hungarian-American speech community in North Carolina, USA. Secondly, it
attempts to give a sociolinguistic analysis of the examined community based
on quantitative data in order to find those sociolinguistic variables which
make this community susceptible to the proposed ranking governing the
sociocognitive mechanism of code-switching. Hence, my intent is to describe
the particular socio-cognitive context in which there is a presumably shared
knowledge of the sociopragmatic functions of code-switching governed by
an optimal bilingual grammar. Sociolinguistic data necessary for such an
analysis have been collected via sociolinguistic questionnaires filled out by
the informants of this study as well as by empirical observation.
The main aim of the study, therefore, is characterize the socio-cognitive
dimension of the examined Hungarian-American immigrant community
which determines the optimality of sociopragmatic functions that instances
of code-switches are expected to fulfill in particular situations governed by a
community-specific ranking of constraints of a bilingual grammar.
The significance of this study lies in that, on the one hand, it provides
ample empirical — quantitative and qualitative — data for the applicability of
Bhatt and Bolonyai’s Optimality Theory for the analysis of bilingual language
use on a Hungarian-English corpus’. Also, it offers a large-scale sample
of Hungarian-American language use. The sample consists of 54 hours of
7 Bhatt - Bolonyai, Ibid., 522-546
8 Bhatt - Bolonyai, Ibid., 522-546
° Bhatt - Bolonyai, Ibid., 522-546
10 Bhatt - Bolonyai, Ibid., 522-546