Oldal 171 [171]
AN OPTIMALITY THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN BILINGUAL USE
In this utterance, the speaker recalls his memories of being a stockbroker.
He compares the extent of investment in the past to the present situation.
When uttering the word investment, he switches to English. As he was working
as a stockbroker in the USA, he used all the business-related technical and
professional terms in English. Presumably, his Hungarian semantic competence
is not as strong as his English one. Therefore, it is easier for the speaker to cite
business-related technical terms in English.
The functions of Solidarity-related code-switches
The various sociopragmatic Solidarity-related functions that have been found
in the sample are listed in the following subsection. All examples come from
the author’s own data.
(a) We-code
Example [49]
1 G1M23,50“O, mi azt hasznaltuk, when we did not want other people to
understand, we switched to anoher language in a grocery store
or
3 other places.”
(‘Oh, we did that, when we did not want other people to understand, we
switched to anoher language in a grocery store or other places.’)
(source: data collected by Kovacs in 2008-2009)
In this utterance, the speaker recalls his experience of talking Hungarian
with his Hungarian-American family members with the aim of excluding
Americans from their conversation. In this interview, the speaker’s daughter
is also present. As a second generation Hungarian-American she speaks and
understands Hungarian, but she uses English predominantly even when
speaking to her father. The father, in respect of his daughter’s common language
use patterns and her weaker Hungarian competence, switches to English. Also,
by switching to English, the speaker provides his daughter the opportunity to
participate with her optimal linguistic competence and as a member of the
family in the conversation that is about her family. Although the ‘we-code’,
the default language of the interview is Hungarian, in this instance, the ‘we¬
code’ of the family, English becomes more important, that is why the speaker
switches to English and continues this utterance in English.
* 169 +