„Nieopisany błękit wody, która ściąga na siebie barwę nieba”. Nazwy barw w powieści Zatoka śpiewających traw Stanisławy Fleszarowej-Muskat

The aim of this paper is to analyze colour terms used in the novel Zatoka śpiewających traw [The Bay of Singing Grass] by Stanisława Fleszarowa-Muskat (1919–1989). The writer conventionally employs colour words to create the characters of the novel, including their appearance and emotions, the latter being expressed metonymically: SYMPTOM (i.e. COLOUR) FOR EMOTION. However, descriptions of landscapes, especially of the sea, are poetic. It appears that they also serve to create the main character, a young woman who is a chemist. In the descriptions of the sea, the writer frequently employs the colour noun błękit ‘(sky) blue’. The writer uses 177 colour terms; 66.1% of them are basic and 39.9% are nonbasic. The frequency ranking list of the basic colour terms, especially the primary ones: biały ‘white’, czarny ‘black’, czerwony ‘red’, zielony ‘green’, żółty ‘yellow’ and niebieski ‘blue’, correlates with the evolutionary sequence proposed by Berlin and Kay in Basic Color Terms (1969).