OCR Output

OPTIMALITY THEORY IN ANALYZING BILINGUAL USE

generation immigrant, speaks about how the safety measures introduced after
the September 11" attacks have rearranged American public safety and the
social landscape.

Example [3]

1 A “Most itt azöta van rend, amiöta elöjött ez az ... ize, a homeland

security

2 problema, most mindenhol civil ruhäs, meg egyenruhäs rendörök
vannak,

3 és ezek ... az ilyen bűnözések egy kicsit lecsökkentek, mert mindent
figyelnek."

(Now, here its been order since this ... this whatchamacallit, the homeland
security problem has come up, now there are policemen in plainclothes and
uniform everywhere, and these ... like the crimes have decreased a little,
because they are watching everything.)

(source: data collected by Kovács in 2008—2009)

In Bhatt and Bolonyais interpretation, the switch from Hungarian to English
is an illustration of how a code-switched utterance constructs a more specific,
authentic, economic socio-cultural meaning than the monolingual candidate
would™!. The speaker switches in the first line to English homeland security
to index a socio-cultural meaning embedded in American culture. After the
September 11 attacks, the US introduced severe security measures to restore
the notion of public safety. As this event and its impact on the contemporary
American socio-political setting are deep-seated in American people’s
mentality, the speaker relies on the English code-switched term instead of the
monolingual Hungarian candidate to express it. The hesitating word-search “ez
az izé” (‘whatchamacallit’) in line 1 before the switch takes place also indicates
that the speaker does not find a corresponding Hungarian term that would
construct the same authentic meaning. The semantic equivalent of homeland
security could be the Hungarian “nemzetbiztonsag” (‘national security’) or
“honfoldbiztonsag” (‘homeland security’) terms, though none of those have
the same socio-political connotation as the English one. Applying Bhatt and
Bolonyai’s model, in this utterance, the code-switched term is more harmonic
with the principle of Faith expressing a socio-cultural concept embedded ina
particular culture than the monolingual one.

121 Bhatt - Bolonyai, Code-switching and the optimal grammar of bilingual use, Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition, 527

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