Oldal 49 [49]
OPTIMALITY THEORY IN ANALYZING BILINGUAL USE
Example [1]
1 A “There have been several analyses of this phenomenon. First, there is
the
2 religious angle which is to do with Indian society. In India a man feels
3 guilty when fantasizing about another man’s wife, unlike in the west.
The
4 saat pheras (‘seven circumnavigations’) around the agni (‘fire’) serves
as
5 a lakshman rekha (line one does not cross’)"®,
(cited by Bhatt and Bolonyai)'””
The Hindi-English language of this newspaper extract places the utterance in
the appropriate contemporary setting of Indian society interwoven by Hindu
and English cultural interaction. The Hindi quotes are from the most important
cultural narratives of Hindu culture: the Vedas (the historical narrative) and
the Ramayana (the great Hindu epic). The Hindi terms serve as a sub text to
the main English text. By originally leaving the Hindi terms without giving
any English explanation or translation, the readers are oriented to place the
text in the context of contemporary Indian society intertwined by the English
language and traditional Hindu culture entrenched in the cultural-historical
texts of the Vedas and Ramayana. ‘The switch to Hindi (lines 3 and 4) evokes a
socio-cultural meaning that is rooted in ancient Hindu culture, transmitted
by the historical texts. The monolingual English version could not convey
the same semantic-conceptual meaning of this socio-culturally bound term.
Therefore, between the two competing candidates — the monolingual English
one and the switch to Hindi — the latter complies more optimally with the
socio-pragmatic function of Faith of indexing a socio-culturally grounded
meaning.
Example [2] has been recorded by Auer in a conversation between five
Spanish-German bilinguals in Hamburg in an apartment. One participant,
a guest (C), at some point of the conversation wants to smoke a cigarette
and seems to be hesitating between staying in the room, which would be an
accepted code of conduct in his continent, South America, or going outside
into the corridor, in compliance with German social rules. The figures refer
to the lines, and the letters refer to the various speakers.
116 "The English translations in brackets have been not been part of the original quote, they have
been provided by Bhatt and Bolonyai.
47 Bhatt — Bolonyai, Code-switching and the optimal grammar of bilingual use, Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition, 526
+ A7 +