Oldal 51 [51]
OCR
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 + 49 +
