The Russian Words for Anxiety Revisited
The Russian Words for Anxiety Revisited

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the Russian words for worry and anxiety. The analysis focuses on the wordfamilies of bespokoitʹ and trevoga. It is based on data from the Russian-English and English-Russiansubcorpora of the Russian National Corpus. These data support the hypothesis that the words inthe bespokoitʹ family involve a greater degree of intellectual assessment of the situation, whereasthe words in the trevoga family point to a more intense and less uniform emotional experience. Atthe same time, the study helped verify certain details of earlier descriptions that had been obtainedwithout parallel corpora.The choice of a translation equivalent in each particular case depends not only on semanticsbut also on the overall translation strategy and the individual preferences of the translator. Nevertheless,certain general patterns can be observed. For example, with the word bespokoitʹsja, as withthe English word worry, it is important that the subject is thinking over the situation and consideringthat it may take a turn for the worse. In the case of trevoga, as with anxiety, a key element is thatthe subject lacks important knowledge about the situation and therefore does not know what canbe done to prevent negative developments. The words vstrevožitʹ and vstrevožitʹsja, like the Englishword alarmed, are characterized by a sudden realization that something bad might happen and thatsome action must be taken in response.

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