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AN OPTIMALITY THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN BILINGUAL USE North Carolina). These data provide evidence of the applicability of Bolonyai and Bhatt’s model on the Hungarian-American community specific mechanism of code-switching. As the scope of Bolonyai and Bhatt’s model covers only the sociopragmatically meaningful instances of code-switches but not the ones driven by lack of appropriate language competence, second-generation data have been excluded from this quantitative analysis. With regard to second-generation speakers, their reduced Hungarian competence — as compared to first-generation speakers — makes it difficult to appropriately differentiate between sociopragmatically meaningful code-switched instances and instances emerging due to reduced language competence. To be able to quantify uniformly code-switched instances, a matrix language and an embedded language must be separable in the subjects’ speech??. However, second-generation speakers’ Hungarian competence is so reduced as compared to first-generation speakers that it is more like a composite matrix language”, in which the instances of codeswitches cannot be distinguished from linguistic interference of the two language systems activated in their speech. In the following example, I intend to illustrate that due to second-generation speakers’ reduced Hungarian competence, the code-switched instance cannot be distinguished from elements of a composite matrix language. Example [22] 1 G2F17 "Igen, mert most látom, hogy ez tényleg, so jó beszélni magyarul, 2 nem kell azért úgy embarrassed lenni róla, vagy valami" (Yes, because now I can see that this is really, so it is good to speak in English, you don’t have to be embarrassed about it or something’) (source: data collected by Kovacs in 2008-2009) In this extract, G2 speaker talks about the importance of speaking Hungarian. She speaks Hungarian, though, her use of analytical structures such as the overwhelming use of adjective plus infinitive structure (“j6 beszélni magyarul”) (‘it is good to speak in Hungarian’) and (“nem kell azért igy embarrassed lenni rola”) (‘you don’t have to be so embarrassed about it’) as well as the use of a lexical calque in line 1, ("most látom") (‘now I can see’), which is the literal translation of the English equivalent, all shows that the Hungarian language the speaker uses is actually a composite English-Hungarian matrix one. The 293 Myers-Scotton, Duelling Languages: Grammatical Structures in Code-switching 294 Myers-Scotton, Code-switching as indexal of social negotiations, 151-186; Carol MyersScotton, The matrix language frame model: Development and responses, in: Rodolfo Jacobson (ed.), Code-switching Worldwide, 2, 2000, 23-58
