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AN OPTIMALITY THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN BILINGUAL USE
3 furcsának gondoltam, hogy mit érdeklődik ez ..."
(and they start a conversation, I always have the feeling that this hi, how
are you,
hi, how are you, first I found this so strange, why they would want to enguire
we)
(source: data collected by Kovacs in 2008-2009)
In this utterance, the speaker highlights one significant difference between
American and Hungarian speech practices deriving from the various
cultural connotations of some common set linguistic expressions. She — as a
Hungarian - finds particularly strange the fact that Americans always start a
conversation by saying ‘hi, how are you’. She is particularly surprised by this
as in the Hungarian cultural script, this question entails actual interest, while
in the USA, it rather serves as a way of greeting or starting a conversation
than expressing real interest in how the other person is. To illustrate this —
for Hungarians — surprising element of American manners, she switches to
English to say hi, how are you. As the Hungarian connotation of this utterance
is significantly different than the American-English one, in order to optimize
the culture specific connotation, the faithful interpretiveness of this utterance,
she switches to English.
(b) Filling in a semantic gap
Example [45]
1 GIF835 “.. Van egy, 666, Theonak van most egy Uj munkatarsa, aki
tiz
2 évvel ezelőtt feltalált egy kis ketyerét, így fogom nevezni, mert
3 nem tudom igazából, page keeper, ő page keepernek nevezi"
(... Now, Iheo has a new colleague, who ten years ago invented a gadget, I
will call it like this because I do not really know its name, page keeper, he
calls it a page keeper.)
(source: data collected by Kovács in 2008—2009)
In this utterance, the speaker talks about something that an acguaintance of
hers invented. As in the Hungarian vocabulary no appropriate term exists
for this invention, or she is not familiar with it, she fills in this semantic
gap first by resorting to the English name of ‘this gadget’. Then she switches
to English to specify this invention and to express this specificity with the
greatest economy. Hence, in this case, the switch to English serves the function
of filling in this particular semantic gap.
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