The paper explores the importance of the concept of 'taste' in the formation of the Croatian and the Turkish lexicon. The main goals of the paper are 1) to investigate differences and similarities in conceptual mappings based on the concept of 'taste' in two typologically different and genetically unrelated languages by analyzing the vocabulary based on the root kus in Croatian and the vocabulary based on the root tat in Turkish and 2) to see to what extent the formation of taste vocabulary differs with respect to lexicalization patterns in the two languages.

The goal of this chapter is to identify and describe strategies speakers of Croatian, Czech, and Polish use in color naming. The findings are based on the data from the cross-linguistic project Evolution of Semantic Systems (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands). Croatian, Czech, and Polish were among more than 50 Indo-European languages included in the project. In this study, we present the results of the color naming task for the three languages. The study identified the main lexicalization patterns that are productive in the formation of Croatian, Czech, and Polish color terms. They are the results of different grammatical mechanisms used in the lexicalization process. However, the languages differ with respect to the degree of conventionalization of these mechanisms in the domain of color terms.

Lexical semantics is concerned with modeling the meaning of lexical items. Its leading questions are how forms and meanings combine, what they mean, how they are used, and of course also how they change. The answers to these five questions make up the fundamental theoretical assumptions and commitments which underlie different theories of lexical semantics, and they form the basis for their various methodological choices. In this chapter, we discuss four main models of lexical meaning: relational, symbolic, conceptual and distributional. The aim is to investigate their historical background, their specific differences, the methodological and theoretical assumptions that lie behind those differences, the main strengths and the main challenges of each perspective.

This paper deals with the noun-preposition [N PP] construction in Croatian and compares the construction to its counterparts in English and French. Noun – preposition relations are analyzed as grammatical relations which participate in the formation of the lexicon, i.e. as grammatical devices which are productively used as lexicalization patterns. Based on the corpus analysis, [N PP] constructions in Croatian are identified and contrasted to English and French data. Lexical status of multi-word units in Croatian is discussed, as well as the level of idiomaticity of these constructions as compared to English and French. Whereas French and Croatian employ a similar lexicalization pattern, English uses compounding. The lexicon – grammar continuum is thus observed from the perspective of syntactic structures participating in word-formation.