Oldal 63 [63]
OPTIMALITY THEORY IN ANALYZING BILINGUAL USE
3 "Nagyon nehéz volt ez. Bocsánat."
(‘It was very heavy. I’m sorry.’)
(cited by Bhatt and Bolonyai)!°®
The conversation takes place in the home of a Hungarian-American bilingual
family, where Hungarian is the preferred home language. The participants are
an 8-year-old boy and his mother. They are having dinner when the boy offers
to make some lemonade for himself in spite of his mother’s dispreference.
When he spills water on the kitchen counter, he apologizes to his mother.
First in English, then he switches to Hungarian (line 3). The act symbolizes the
multiple management of face needs. When the boy spills water on the kitchen
counter, his attempt to demonstrate his ‘adult’ competence and boldness to act
against her mother’s will fails. His first reaction is to apologize to his mother in
English, his dominant language — but his mother’s dispreferred choice — trying
to save his desired face as an independent, competent boy. Then, he switches
to Hungarian, the shared language of intimacy and the preferred choice of
the mother, in order to ask for her forgiveness. By switching to Hungarian, he
reconstructs his face of his mother’s son — apologizing in a language that his
mother prefers — acknowledging his incompetence. The switch to Hungarian,
hence, fulfils multiple functions of the subtle face-threatening and face-saving
acts deployed by the son to position himself in relation with his mother.
5 The principle of perspective taking [PERSPECTIVE]
Relying on concepts applied in the field of communications and pragmatics
(“footing”’; “frame”’; “voice”! “stance”!; and “positioning”’®*), Bhatt and
Bolonyai have developed the principle of Perspective to include all discourse¬
related practices in bi- (or multi)lingual speech mode that enable the speaker
to set up, to enter, and to leave (to shift between) dual or multiple ‘realities’
instantiated by the code they use and appropriated by the situation. According
to Bhatt and Bolonyai, those instances of code-switches can be subsumed
under the Principle of Perspective which enable “to maximize perspectivity in
15:
œ
Bhatt — Bolonyai, Ibid., 533
Goffman, Footing, Semiotica, 5
Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1974
159
160
16
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, in: Michael Holquist (ed.), Austin,
University of Texas Press, 1981
Elinor Ochs, Indexing gender, in: Alessandro Duranti — Charles Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking
Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1992, 335-358
Brownyn Davies — Rom Harré, Positioning: The social construction of selves, Journal for the
Theory of Social Behavior, 20 (1990), 43-63
162
16
ús
+61 +