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CHAPTER 8 —o> — OVERALL SUMMARY In this study, I set out (Chapters 1, 2) to test the applicability of Bolonyai and Bhatt’s Optimality Theory for the analysis of bilingual grammar on the Hungarian-American immigrant community living in North Carolina and to analyze the sociolinguistic characteristics of the examined community describing the socio-cognitive dimension, which instantiates the community’s bilingual grammar. First, I have examined the meaning-making function of code-switching from various theoretical perspectives (Chapter 3). Then, the theoretical framework of the Optimality Theory for the analysis of bilingual grammar has been discussed (Chapter 4) with special emphasis on the interaction of sociopragmatic constraints governing the meaning-making mechanism of code-switching. My own research has focused on the examined Hungarian-American immigrant community’s, more particularly on the North Carolina Hungarian Club’s, collective code-switching patterns and on the sociopragmatic functions they fulfill individually (Chapter 7) and in interaction with the others (Chapter 7). The interaction of the constraints has been represented in algorithmic tableaux. As Lalso set out to define the examined Hungarian-American community in its appropriate socio-cognitive dimension, a thorough description has been provided placing the examined community in its relevant socio-historicalcultural macro- (Chapter 5) and micro-context (Chapter 7). Relying on statistically significant correlations in the community’s sociolinguistic characteristics (Chapter 7), two sociolinguistically distinct subcommunities have emerged in the examined community along the lines of intergenerational affiliation — first- and second-generation speakers. In light of the sociolinguistic data, I have argued that the community-specific ranking proposed by Bolonyai and Bhatt?" cannot be applied for describing both first-, 310 Bhatt — Bolonyai, Ibid., 522-546 * 181 °
