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AN OPTIMALITY THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN BILINGUAL USE The next example [24] provides evidence of a code-switched instance triggered by the speaker’s reduced Hungarian competence as well as restricted use of Hungarian. In this extract, the speaker tells how fortunate it was that he had nothing to eat because he could get an injection against yellow fever. Example [24] 1 GI1M52,65,,J6, hogy nem ettem, nem volt időm, ..., próbáltam injekciót kapjak a yellow fever tudod.” (‘It was good that I did not eat, I had no time ... I tried to get an injection, yellow fever, you know’) (source: data collected by Kovacs in 2008-2009) Although the speaker in this example is a first-generation Hungarian, he has been living in the USA since he was 13 and now he is 65, and his Hungarian competence has been considerably reduced. When he wants to mention the name of the disease that he got an injection against, he switches to English (yellow fever, line 2). The switch on the one hand fills in a gap in the speaker’s reduced Hungarian lexicon. On the other hand, the switch is also prompted by his reduced Hungarian competence. The structure of the Hungarian sentence is interfered by the English structure, and the ending term of the sentence, “tudod”, (‘you know’) is also a term used widely in English, but less so in Hungarian. Therefore, the speaker’s reduced Hungarian competence as well as his limited Hungarian lexicon prompt the speaker to switch to English. This switch, however, serves no other sociopragmatically meaningful function. In the next example [25] provided below, the sociopragmatic function of the code-switch from Hungarian to English does not seem to have a meaningful sociopragmatic function, either. Example [25] 1 G1M17,37 “... mert huszonnyolckor, huszonnyolc éves korodba száz pounddal overweight vagy, az normalis “ (“... because at the age of twenty-eight, when you are twenty-eight, you are a hundred pound overweight, and that is normal’) (source: data collected by Kovacs in 2008-2009) In this extract, the speaker criticizes the way that average American women look when they are still young. To express the extent of their obesity, he switches to pound as a measure of their weight. As weight in the USA is measured in pounds, he switches to English. Probably the switch to the English pound
