Atkins & Levin: Near synonyms of the word ‘shake’ (‘quiver’, ‘tremble’, ‘shudder’, etc…) are investigated as to their syntactic aspects. Though the researchers did not expect all of the near synonyms to have a transitive use (a use as a predicate with more than one argument), to their surprise every single term had at least one transitive use. However, not all of the terms had a distinctively causitive transitive use. A causative transitive use of a verb is a use that adds the notion “cause” to the meaning of the intransitive use (for example: “The man shrunk the shirt” can be paraphrased as “the man CAUSED the shirt to shrink”). Atkins and Levin introduce the notions of “externally caused” and “internally caused” verb. To say that a verb is externally caused is to say that the event described by the verb had some kind of cause outside of itself, whereas to say that a verb is internally caused is to say that the event described by the verb is controlled, without external causation, by the agent performing it. (the verb “opened” is of the former kind, the verb “speak” is of the latter). Atkins and Levin use this distinction to explain why some of the near synonyms of “shake” exhibit a causative transitive use and others don’t: the ones that do admit of causative transitivity are externally caused, and the one’s that don’t are internally caused.

Slobin: A preliminary distinction is drawn between Satellite framed languages (S-languages) and Verb framed languages (V-languages). The former express path description by an element associated with the main verb (like “the boy climbed up the tree”) while the latter expresses path description by the verb itself (“the boy entered the hole”) One way to bring out the differences between these two types of languages is to look at “Frog stories” - participants in a study are shown two pictures, one of which shows a boy in a tree looking into a hole (for a frog), the other shows the boy on the ground and an owl in the hole. The “frog story” is the narrative told by the participants about these two pictures. English speakers were more likely to use such phrases as “an owl POPPED UP from the hole” or “the owl CAME OUT of the hole” showing English to be an S-language. By contrast, speakers of V-languages were more likely to use phrases like “an owl EXITED the tree”.

Haspelmath: A distinction is drawn between lexemes, words as they would appear in the dictionary, and word-forms (strings separated by spaces). So for instance, the word-form ‘loved’ belongs to the lexeme ‘love’. A morpheme is defined as the smallest significant part of a single word (for example, the affix ‘ED’ in ‘lovED’ is a morpheme). Compounds are defined as complex lexemes built up from preexisting lexemes (like lipstick built up from ‘lip’ and ‘stick) - in many of these compound words the first lexeme, the ‘dependent’, is comparatively less important than the second lexeme, the ‘head’.

I found the Atkins and Levins reading the most interesting of the bunch. And I was wondering if it was possible for their to be internally caused verbs that did not pertain to people (willing agents). Both of their examples, ‘play’ and ‘speak’ were about people, but perhaps there are other verbs that do not apply to people but nevertheless have the same kind of ‘internal causation’ property such as “bloom” (when talking about a flower for instance).