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CHAPTER 7 FINDINGS
the sentence in English. By repeating the Hungarian sentence in English, he
actually recalls the incident guoting the original sentence. Ihe speaker still
seems emotionally involved when recalling this incident as he apparently has
interpreted it as a threat to his supposedly well-established status in this group
of American colleagues, despite the fact that he is not American but Hungarian.
(p) Narrative frame break, evaluation, coda
Example [43]
1 G1F82,60 “De a lakás az itt van, meg whatever."
(‘But the apartment is here, and whatever.)
(source: data collected by Kovács in 2008—2009)
Code-switching might fulfill the function of a narrative break, or coda when
the speaker switches to another language “to depart from the narrative frame
to evaluate some aspect of the story or to deliver the punch line, or ending”?”.
In this utterance, the speaker is asked about where she feels her actual home is.
She begins by saying in Hungarian that she has her apartment here, and then
she switches to English to end the sentence by saying whatever. By switching
to English she indicates — without giving any other cues — that she wants to
put an end to this issue even though she cannot really give an appropriate
response to the question. Feeling slightly uncomfortable by the question, she
switches to English, to conclude the sentence. This code-switched instance,
therefore, serves as an indication of delivering an ending to her utterance, or
as its narrative coda.
The functions of Faith-related code-switches
The following functions of code-switches have been identified to fall within
the principle of Faith in the examined set of data. All examples come from the
author’s own data collected in 2007-2008.
(a) Culture-specific connotations
Example [44]
1 G1F8,35 “elkezd egy beszelgetest, nekem mindig az az érzésem, hogy hi,
how are you, hi, how are you, ez olyan először olyan nagyon
307 Zentella, Growing Up Bilingual, 94
* 166"