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Comments

What did you say for the basic word order?

 I chose that Malayalam has a separate question particle, -oo, which is
 sentence final.  There are cases where the suffix is added to verbs
 which are not sentence final, so the rules may need to be revised for
 other cases.

Does -oo always appear on the verb?  It seems that we need a new
option in that library then "yes-no questions marked by inflection
on the verb".

	There doesn't seem to be any limits on the cases allowed for
 subject and object nouns.  (Of course with flexible word order, those
 rules will be difficult.) Perhaps some rules could be written to
 prevent both nouns from being ACC, or requiring al least one NOM noun
 in a sentence?  It seems that all sentences which have a noun have at
 least one noun in nominative form with the exception of sentences with
 modals, in which case the subject is in dative form.

I think we cleared this up in class, but just in case:  You need
to distinguish between grammatical function and syntactic position.
The grammatical function in Malayalam is linked to nominative case,
no matter which position the noun is in.

	 Coordination is not working very well and could be improved.
 The rules are working to add the coordinating suffix to nouns and not
 to verbs, thank goodness.  However, the rules currently overgenerate
 because there doesn't seem to be a requirement that both nouns have a
 coordinating suffix. The rules allow only one noun to have the
 suffix. 

I'd like to test this out to see what's going on.  Can you insert an
example in your next write up?  In general, when you report things like
this, please paste in examples from your test suite that illustrate the
problem so that I can investigate.  Thanks!

 Of course I have a more complicated case in which there are
 multiple sets of coordinating subject/object pairs with a single verb
 which applies to all the pairs.  A saw B and C saw D is written as: A
 B-um C D-um saw.

I think this is actually non-constituent coordination, which is
tricky in general and which I don't expect to get to.  It's interesting
to me that it turns up in your reference materials alongside the other
coordiation information. Perhaps it's a particularly common construction
in Malayalam?