Page 50 [50]
OCR
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fumar” (‘to smoke’) (...) 3 J “aqui no hay aqui no hay nichtraucher” (here we don’t have no-smokin’) (Peter Giese, unpublished data, 1992-1993, cited by Auer’’*) In Auer’s analysis, the switch in line 3 to German acts as a discourse-related switch which accentuates the difference in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 HungarianAmerican immigrant community under the supervision of and in cooperation with Ágnes Bolonyai, a Professor of English at the State University of North Carolina. + 48 +
