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Comments

Did you add test suite examples illustrating the possible
orders of different qualificatives?

 3) Argument optionality in Zulu gets pretty complicated. All
 declarative verbs must agree with their subjects.  The subject is
 therefore optional.

The correlation between agreement and pro-drop is not perfect,
so I think   'therefore' might be a bit strong.

 6) There is a class of words called qualificatives in Zulu, which
 includes adjectives, relatives, and enumeratives.  Adjectives and
 enumeratives are very small and apparently closed classes, while
 relatives have a mechanism for building new modifiers out of verbs.
 Qualificatives agree with the noun the modify.  They can be used
 nominally, e.g. 'umu-fana omu-de' means 'the tall boy' and 'omu-de' by
 itself means 'the tall one'.  Adjectives occur on the

Cut off in mid-sentence?  What about adverbs?

Your adverb (kakhulu) seems to be underconstrained in what it modifies.
[HEAD verb] is compatible with V, VP and S...


  With ditransitive verbs it gets even more complex.  There is only
 allowed to be one object marker on the verb. In the basic form of
 ditransitive verbs, both objects are present, and the indirect object
 is both closer to the verb and it agrees with the object concord (if
 applicable).  However, the indirect object is optional, in which case
 the object concord can agree with the direct object. This is all hard
 to model because with ditransitives pretty much any ordering of the
 arguments is acceptible in some contexts, but with slightly different
 semantics (e.g. topicalization). It was especially hard to make good
 test sentences because pretty much everything is grammatical
 somehow. Most of my effort in this assignment went into finding out
 about ditransitives, because the books I had did not cover them in the
 detail I needed. Unfortunately, once I finally knew what was going on,
 I didn't have much time to get them working in the actual grammar.

 4) I did not make any new types in particular to get object
 optionality working. Eventually I will need to make a new type for
 ditransitives because one of their arguments is optional.  It looks
 like it might be a hairy mess, though, to get the object concord to
 agree with the second thing on the comps list.

I think it comes down to making a second series of obj concord rules,
where the noun class constraints go on the second argument.  But wait,
is it always the first argument that is agreed with?  Can you have 

	S verb-agreeing-with-IO (dropped IO) DO
	S verb-agreeing-with-DO (dropped DO) IO

Or is it just

	S verb-agreeing-with-IO IO DO
	S verb-agreeing with-DO DO IO

And what about

	S verb-agreeing-with IO
	S verb-agreeing-with DO

I think this is doable, but you don't provide enough detail in your write
up for me to understand the pattern...


Can the relative modifiers also be used without a head noun?  If that's
the case, I think what you want is a phrase structure rule which takes
an adjective-like daughter and returns and N' over that daughter.  This could
potentially apply to the demonstratives and all of the qualificatives.

 8) For adjectives, my test suite mostly contains positive examples of
 a few adjectives agreeing with nouns of various classes.  As the rules
 were just modified versions of my other agreement rules, I didn't feel
 it was necessary to put in negative agreement examples. I did put in
 one where I attempted to modify a first-person pronoun, and one with
 the adjective in front of the noun. These all currently parse as
 expected.

You'd be surprised at what the negative examples can do, though.
The mistaken agreement adjective example could, say, parse with
the adjective attaching (mistakenly) to some other constituent...

 I am unhappy that I got so little done this week.  I spent most of the
 time trying to find out about ditransitive verbs. The information I
 had was vague and confusing, and I had trouble finding anything
 concrete. I didn't find the book about double object constructions
 until midday on Sunday. This was a depressing assignment.

:(  One strategy is to move on to other parts of the assignment if you're
stuck on one...