Abstract
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.