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CHAPTER 4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Example [2]
1 J “Por qué por qué quieres ir al flur?”
(‘why do you want to go out in the corridor?’)
2 C “para fumar”
(‘to smoke’)
(...)
3 J “aqui no hay aqui no hay nichtraucher”
(here we don’t have no-smokin’)
(Peter Giese, unpublished data, 1992-1993, cited by Auer’’*)
In Auer’s analysis, the switch in line 3 to German acts as a discourse-relat¬
ed switch which accentuates the difference in South American and German
codes of conduct regarding smoking'’. While in South America smoking in an
apartment is a widely accepted way of behaving, in German culture there are
non-smoking rules forbidding smoking in apartments. The switch to German
in a prevalently Spanish conversation is an indication of such a differentiation.
It illustrates that the concept of non-smoking apartments is more unusual in
South America than in Germany.
In Bhatt and Bolonyai’s framework, the code-switch is an example of
complying with the principle of Faith. The two candidates competing for the
most optimal meaning-making surface representation are the monolingual
Spanish form (no fumador) and the code-switched German term (nichtraucher).
Although the Spanish term conveys the same meaning as the German one,
it lacks the cultural-bound particularization of the German candidate. The
German code-switch placed in a basically Spanish conversation contrasts the
peculiar ways in which South American and German cultures relate to the
habit of smoking. Therefore, the German code-switch captures the intended
meaning more faithfully and economically, which is a basic tenet of the
principle of Faith. Hence, in the OT framework, the German code-switched
term is evaluated as the one complying more optimally with the principle of
Faith.
Example [3] has been taken from the Hungarian-American sample of
interviews conducted among Hungarian-Americans living in North Carolina
by myself and Bolonyai in the course of 2007 and 2008'”°. The speaker, a first
118 Auer, Introduction, 6
119 Auer, Ibid., 7
120 I as a Fulbright post-graduate visiting researcher conducted research in the Hungarian¬
American immigrant community under the supervision of and in cooperation with Ágnes
Bolonyai, a Professor of English at the State University of North Carolina.
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