Page 171 [171]
OCR
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 ‘wecode’ of the family, English becomes more important, that is why the speaker switches to English and continues this utterance in English. * 169 +
