Code-switching in Tunisian Arabic: a multi-factorial random forest analysis

This paper explores the morphosyntactic and cognitive principles influencing code-switching (cs) from Tunisian Arabic to French. We annotate data from the TuniCo corpus for many variables and run a Random Forest to overcome the methodological challenges typically associated with low-resource languages and imbalanced data. We find cs is not affected by any factor in isolation, but by a constellation of interactions. Our results partially confirm previous findings: ( i) to maintain the code-integrity at the phrase and discourse levels, speakers tend to switch dependent parts-of-speech when the latter's head is switched; ( ii) nps are a prime location for cs; and ( iii) speakers are attuned to the cognitive load they impose on themselves and/or on listeners.