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AN OPTIMALITY THEORETICAL ANALYSIS OF HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN BILINGUAL USE
considered for analysis. However, it must be pointed out that as the unmarked
linguistic choice in the examined bilingual speech community is Hungarian,
the overwhelming majority of code-switches are from Hungarian to English.
In the examined speech community including G1 speakers, there is a
common understanding of the meaning-making role of code-switching
in either direction. With that in mind, each instance of code-switching
is evaluated individually in the light of the given situation and that of all
background information relevant for the evaluation of the sociopragmatic
functions fulfilled by these instances of code-switching.
As has been previously pointed out that there is a considerable difference in
the level of competence of G1 and G2 speakers. G2 speakers have a considerably
lower level of Hungarian than their Gl counterparts. Therefore, the code¬
switched instances of G2 speakers are prompted by their low level of Hungarian
competence rather than by the speakers’ need to index the sociopragmatic
meaning of the utterances. As the code-switches prompted by the lack of
adequate competence in a language are not included in the framework of the
Optimality Theory for the analysis of bilingual grammar, the code-switched
instances of G2 subjects are excluded from the scope of my examination. Also,
in the previous subsection it has also been pointed out that the notion of the
English and Hungarian languages is so different for G1 and G2 speakers that
they do not share the same set of sociopragmatic constraints governing their
code-switching tendencies.
In the section below, I provide examples to demonstrate how the five
constraints interact with each other in the examined set of data. The most
frequently occurring function is examined first. To illustrate the interaction
between Perspective and the other four constraints, example [54] has been
analyzed.
Example [54] — The interaction of PERSPECTIVE and SOLIDARITY
1 GI1F42,22 “Jaj, jöttem visitbe, egy csaladhoz, és amíg itt voltam,
2 kaptam egy...
(‘Yeah, I came to visit a family, and while I was here, I got one ...’)
(source: data collected by Kovacs in 2008-2009)
In this utterance, the speaker remembers the first time she came to the USA.
When recalling the circumstances, she switches to English to say that she came
to visit somebody. The switch to visit contextualizes the original purpose of
her coming to the USA. By switching to English in the middle of a Hungarian
sentence, she accentuates the fact that she originally came to the USA visiting
somebody and not with the purpose of immigrating. As Hungarian is the
unmarked language of the interview, the language of solidarity, by switching
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