Oldal 174 [174]
CHAPTER 7 FINDINGS
(a) Making evaluative or validating comments
Example [53]
G1F36,63 “De nem Sacher volt, sokkal jobb, mint a Sacher. But it was very
good.”
‘But it wasn’t Sacher, it was much better than Sacher. But it was very good.’)
source: data collected by Kovacs in 2008-2009)
RAR NE
In this utterance, the speaker comments on the quality of a cake. She claims
that it was not a Sacher cake, but it was much better. Switching to English to
make a final evaluative comment on the quality of the cake enables the speaker
to accentuate the force of the evaluative comment. When switching to English,
the speaker also indicates her shift into the position of an expert - she is
actually famous in the Hungarian-American community for her great cakes
and pastries. As such, she feels to have more vested competence to make such
an evaluative comment. The switch to English also functions as a narrative
coda putting an end to the utterance as well as signaling that the evaluative
comment is not intended to be subject to further discussion.
The interaction of constraints
In this section, I provide a qualitative analysis of the interaction between
the five principle acting as constraints in particular contexts. The process
of the conflict between the five sociopragmatic constraints is illustrated in
tableaux. In these tableaux, the constraints that are violated by the examined
code-switched or monolingual candidates are indicated with asterisks. The
constraints are arranged in the order following the hierarchy proposed by
Bolonyai and Bhatt*°’ with the highest ranked constraint placed in the left
side of the tableaux and the lowest at the extreme right of the tableaux. The
candidates undergo the array of the five hierarchically arranged constraints,
and if they violate one particular constraint, it is marked with an asterisk.
Violating the highest ranked constraint is lethal, marked with exclamation
marks, which means that the surface realization of the violating candidate is
disqualified.
As the Optimality Theory for the analysis of bilingual grammar does not
make a distinction in terms of the direction of switching, switches from
Hungarian to English as well as from English to Hungarian are equally
3°8 Bhatt — Bolonyai, Code-switching and the optimal grammar of bilingual use, Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition, 522-546
* 172 +