The Atkins article tackles the problem of comparing near-synonyms by examining a group of ‘shake verbs’ and observing the way they differ. I took the primary point of the paper to be distinguishing between internally and externally caused verbs: externally caused verbs refer to events with external cause (‘open’) vs an internal cause (speak). They find that while all of the shake verbs have a transitive use, they don’t all have a causative transitive use, and the distinction between externally/internally caused verbs is posited as an explanation for this inconsistency. 

Slobin's article posits casting languages as either V-languages (Verb framed languages) and S-languages (Satellite framed languages), determined by the manner in which verbs are used to describe paths. S-languages pair verbs with a preposition ('the boy climbed up the tree') whereas V-languages contain the entire verb meaning in just the verb ('the boy exited the tree').

The first Haspelmath chapter serves to acquaint the reader with basics concepts from morphology. We learn of the distinction between ‘lexemes’ (dictionary words) and ‘word-forms’ (strings separated by spaces), and of inflectional/derivational morphological relationships. A ‘morpheme’ is introduced as the smallest meaningful subpart of an individual word; affixes, bases and roots are all types of morphemes. Using the language of formal operations is often useful in analyzing the effect the morphemes have on the meaning of words.  

The second Haspelmath builds off of our new knowledge of lexemes to introduce compounds (complex lexeme composed of two or more base lexemes), hyponyms (word/phrase whose meaning is contained in another word), endocentric compounds (compounds whose second word is the ‘head’ and first is the ‘dependent’), and the hierarchical structure underlying head-dependent relations in compounds/derived lexemes.