Oldal 85 [85]
OCR
First LANGUAGE Roots: INTRA-SENTENTIAL LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING protagonist’s perception of a specific cultural environment. As such, it functions as a multiplicator of meaning and source of additional information.® CLOSING REMARKS As this case study of selected literary texts by non-native English writers has shown, intra-sentential code-switching can be used to trace or even represent individual and larger-scale migration in prose and poetry. In the case of secondlanguage writers, switches to their first language(s) appear to be predominantly linked to their connection to concepts, ideas, feelings and personal histories attached to the place and language of their upbringing.® Through strong intra-sentential code-switching, i.e. foreign language insertions without explication, in the realms of food, family, and clothing, the authors allude in the narration to the home cultures they left or had to leave by emphasizing the ‘untranslatability’ of signature items. What appears to be a process of familiarization and (re-)rooting for the authors, however, is defamiliarization for the reader who is—presumably—not a speaker of the embedded language(s). An aid for retrieving the hidden meaning of embedded language terms can be given through explications (weak intra-sentential code-switching), which enrich the understanding of a text especially when they are provided in the form of cultural and/or personal nuances rather than literal translations. Further strategies to allude to migration histories and other-language backgrounds are, without being limited to, the transformation of the spelling of one-word interferences depending on the content of the literary text, or the referral to denotations from early cognitive stages, such as parental names or numbers. In addition, the strategy of metamultilingualism has been shown as an apt device to represent the linguistic in-betweenness that writers who move to other language environments undoubtedly experience. Much remains to be explored in this field of translingual studies, and this case study of first language interferences in ESL writers’ texts was hopefully only one step of many into a more detailed and fruitful exploration of literary multilingualism in literature by translingual authors. 68 Deganutti-Domokos: Four major literary code-switching, 47. 6% See also works by Julia Alvarez, Akwaeke Emezi, Eva Hoffman, Luc Sante or Esmeralda Santiago. +. 83 ¢
