Preliminary ---------------- I was looking at the ODIN data for Zulu, and I found someone's dissertation entitled "Issues in Zulu Verbal Morphosyntax". It has been both helpful and confusing. One thing that this paper says is that the final vowel on the verb form is required and can carry tense/aspect/mood information, and that -a is the default slot-filler, and does not appear to carry any semantic meaning itself. That paper chose to gloss the final -a as FV for Final Vowel. I looked at what Dan Jinguji did with Swahili. It looks like he included the -a as part of the verb root. I thought about this and decided to follow the dissertation (and essentially one of the grammars I'm using) by marking the -a FV. I think it makes more sense to pull it off, and that label seems to be the most accurate description. Still feels weird, but there you go. NEGATION ----------------- Yesterday I was looking at the ODIN data for Zulu, and I found someone's dissertation entitled "Issues in Zulu Verbal Morphosyntax". Wow, looks great. Except, some things I read in it have really confused my description so far. The grammars I've looked at so far have described negation of the future tense as something like this: Positive: SC-zo-R-a Negative: a-SC-zu-R-a where SC is subject concord and R is verb root. This new paper says that the -zo-/-zu- is actually the verb 'come', acting as an auxiliary, with the main verb in infinitival form. Morphophonological changes account for differences between this structure and the surface form. Apparently this analysis makes the analysis of negation across tenses much more predictable. The claim is that the negation appears on the auxiliary, which accounts for the -zo-/-zu- alternation. It also explains why the final vowel doesn't change in the future as it does in other tenses. Up until now I had not been treating -zo- as an auxiliary. After reading this I'm not sure whether I should continue as I have, or use the auxiliary analysis. I keep thinking of this in terms of extensibility, or what the other verb tenses do, and I don't know if I should ignore that in making a decision. Advice? In my test cases for now, I have not marked it as an auxiliary, and I am glossing both -zo- and -zu- as FUT(IMM). If I don't start calling them auxiliaries, should I pick one to be the "underlying" form? I didn't do any -zo-/-zu- alternations for my ungrammatical examples. My ungrammatical examples mostly consist of moving the prefix around. MATRIX YES-NO QUESTIONS ------------------------------------------ Zulu has two strategies for marking yes-no questions: intonation, and adding 'na' to the end of the sentence. I have indicated intonation questions by just putting a question mark at the end. As per the assignment instructions, I have made negative examples by moving the 'na' around. I thought about making some examples where 'na' was an affix, but I am not entirely sure what makes something an affix or not, so I decided to leave that alone. IMPERATIVES -------------------- Imperatives were not listed in the Homework 2 page, but they were on the list for this assignment. I decided to go ahead and do them because they seemed straightforward at first. The basic form for the imperative is just the verb root plus the -a final vowel. If the addressee is plural, -ni is added to the end (after the -a). Adding this to my test suite will help me to get the singular/plural distinction between classes working. I added examples of imperative negation, which use an auxiliary verb mus- that is inherently negative; it roughly translates to "don't". The auxiliary is followed by the main verb in infinitive form (that is, with the class 15 noun prefix). Making ungrammatical examples was difficult because there are a lot of things that are possible. For example, it is possible to add an object concord to the verb, but then the final vowel switches to -e. Apparently this is is also the subjunctive form, and the alternation occurs in other Bantu languages. However, apparently the -a suffix can also occur but it has a more emphatic connotation. There is also a negative form involving the subjunctive, although only one of my sources mentioned it. I included an example that a subject can precede the imperative ('Sipho, run!'), which appears with no subject concord on the verb. Adding the concord is grammatical, it is the simple present, and not the imperative. If the verb stem (root + a) is one syllable, an affix (either prefix or suffix, seemingly at the speaker's preference) is added to make the verb two syllables. I am not sure how to implement this, and I'm not sure what to call the affix. Do I just ignore it in the morpheme-by-morpheme gloss? If not, what do I call it? I haven't used any examples with one-syllable verbs in my test suite, so I ignored this issue for now. EMBEDDED CLAUSES --------------------------------- The embedded clauses I cover here take the form: main clause complementizer subordinate clause. The subordinate clause is in the subjunctive, but is otherwise the same as the main clause. There are six "conjunctives" that I can find, but I only give examples for two of them here. My books do not make any indication which verbs can and cannot appear with embedded clause complements. There doesn't seem to be anything that neatly corresponds to embedded interrogatives, but there are interrogative forms, and things that translate as relative clauses with question words, so I feel like there must be something. I will keep looking for a good example. MODALS ------------- The equivalent of 'can' in Zulu is an affix on the verb. I have used both transitive and intransitive sample sentences, to illustrate where the affix can and cannot occur. I have included one example of the negative version ("can't"). COORDINATION ----------------------- My test sentences here are somewhat limited because I had a lot of trouble finding examples. I still have no examples coordinating more than two nouns. I do know that coordination of nouns occurs by an affix on the second (last?) noun, and coordination of verbs is accomplished by putting all subsequent verbs in the subjunctive (this subjunctive is cropping up all over the place!). The prefix on nouns can be translated as 'and' or 'with'. The examples in my test data are taken from my source grammars, but I had to change the tense to match the rest of my test suite. In the cases where the objects are being coordinated, the 'and' translation is the most obvious. In some cases (like the following) the subject and object are coordinated: Umfana uzodlala nenja umu-fana u-zo-dlal-a na-in-ja C1-boy SC1-FUT(IMM)-play-FV with-C9-dog 'The boy will play with the dog' The English translation is similar in form to the Zulu, but I wonder if 'The boy and the dog will play' is just as accurate. I used an example from one of my books for the verbal coordination, although I wonder if it is too complex for me to reasonably parse by the end of the term. WHAT ELSE? -------------------- Zulu does not have proper case, which is why I didn't do case. I had intended to do some of the valence-changing affixes, as you suggested in my homework 2 assessment. I would still like to get them in. The truth is that I was having a hard time getting anything done this week. I felt kind of overwhelmed (not with this class specifically, but in general) and kind of panicked, which means I sat and stared at my homework and didn't actually do much. Eventually I started picking one feature to work on, totally out of order, and trying to get it done. Eventually I had six, and the valence-change wasn't one of them. Neither was relative clauses, although I could put some of those in too. Except for case, there was not good reason to choose or not choose anything. One thing I've come away with though, is the importance of the subjunctive in some of the more complex verb forms. When I was working on the imperatives, I thought that I wouldn't add the subjunctive stuff in, because it seemed unnecessary. Now I think it is so necessary to all the different forms that I'm going to have to put in some way of specifically handling it.