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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 sociocognitive 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
