One of the requirements for the class is a squib -- a short (7-8 page) paper, ideally an investigation of some aspect of the language you are working on. Just to get you started, here are some topics you might consider.
How does your language create compounds? Is the head on the left or the right? Are there phonological changes that take place in compounds?
Find as many productive derivational morphemes as you can. Do they appear in ambiguous structures? Do they show any morphological peculiarities?
Where does morphological agreement show up? If there is more than one type of agreement, are the agreement paradigms all the same, or do they differ?
Does the language have gender or noun class? If so, how does this affect morphology? To what extent is gender/noun class predictable from the semantics of the noun (e.g., are all female things feminine)?
Does the language mark Case? What is the Case system like (e.g., is it nominative-accusative? ergative-absolutive)? Is case uniformly marked on all NPs, or do different types of NPs have different morphology (e.g., is there a difference between different noun classes, or between nouns and pronouns, or between proper names and other NPs)?
Does the language mark tense? If so, what tenses does it mark?
Describe the verbal morphology as completely as you can. What information is marked on the verb? What types of morphemes are used to mark it? What allomorphs do they have? Is the allomorphy phonologically conditioned?
Consider the inventory of stops in your language. Is there a phonemic distinction in voicing? in aspiration? Give minimal pairs.
Determine the syllable inventory of the language. Can syllables have codas? How many consonants can appear in the coda and in the onset, and are there constraints on which ones can appear?
Download Praat, and make spectrograms of the vowels of your language; give examples with minimal pairs. Compare the formant heights with those in the vowels of English, and identify the vowels with the appropriate IPA symbols. You will need to have access to a computer with a microphone to do this.
When languages borrow words from other languages, they often make phonological changes in them. If your language has borrowed words from English (or another language that you're familiar with), what changes does it make to them to make them fit its phonological system better? If your language has different vowels than English, for example, what changes do the English vowels undergo? If your language doesn't allow the same kinds of consonant clusters that we find in English, what kinds of changes are made to avoid them?
Does your language have tone? If so, what are the different tones? In some tonal languages, the tone on a word can be changed by the tones on adjacent words (a phenomenon known as tone sandhi). Are there tone sandhi effects in your language?
In some languages there's a regular rule for the placement of stress; we find stress on every other syllable, for example, or stress on syllables with long vowels. In other languages stress is just arbitrary; it's one of the things that has to be represented in the lexical entry for the word. How does stress work in your language?
We noticed in English that there seems to be a preferred order of adjectives modifying a noun--for instance, "a big black bug" sounded more natural than "a black big bug". What is the preferred order of adjectives modifying a noun in your language? If we wanted to posit a common D-structure for your language and English, what kinds of movement operations could we use to derive the correct word order?
How does the language form questions? Consider yes-no questions, single-wh questions, and multiple-wh questions.
How are embedded clauses treated in the language? What types of complementizers can you find? Is the word order in embedded clauses the same as in main clauses?
Some languages have what is sometimes called a double object construction, in which an NP denoting an entity construed as benefiting from an action takes on some or all of the characteristics of a direct object; in English, a sentence like "I baked John a cake" is one example, where "John" acts in some ways like the object of the sentence. Does your language have a construction like this? If so, how do such structures behave in passives (if your language has passives)?
Some languages have words called clitics; these are typically short words that obey special rules about where they can be placed in the sentence (for example, they are required to appear before or after the verb, or after the first word in the sentence). Pronouns are one frequent type of clitic. If your language has clitics, where do they go in the sentence? Do they go in the same place in finite and infinitival clauses (if your language has both)? In a sentence with more than one clitic, are the clitics in a fixed order with respect to each other? List as many clitics as you can, and try to figure out what determines their ordering.
What is the basic word order of your language? Is there any freedom of word order? Does changing the word order change the meaning of the sentence? Can you find any tests to show what the constituent structure is (for instance, the types of tests that we were using in class for English)?
Does the language have anaphors like reflexives (himself, herself, myself) and reciprocals (each other)? In what environments are they allowed? How close does the antecedent have to be (for example, does it have to be in the same clause as the anaphor)? Does the antecedent have to be a subject?
Find a negative polarity item. What are the conditions on its use? Can it be licensed by negation in a higher clause? If it is an NP, can it appear in any position in the sentence?
Some languages have morphology (called evidential morphology) indicating how the speaker knows that what she is saying is true; the morphology might indicate, for example, that the statement describes something she witnessed herself, or something she heard someone else claim. Does your language have evidential morphology? What types of evidentiality are distinguished? Where does the morphology appear, and what are the morphemes?
Languages have different ways of expressing what is sometimes called focus; one type of focus, for example, is the type that appears when you're correcting what someone else has said (as in "No, we didn't use butter, we used margarine"--here the underlined words are focused). Some languages have morphemes that they add to focused elements, or put focused elements in a particular position in the sentence. How does your language express focus?