The Russian Words for Anxiety Revisited

This paper deals with the Russian words for worry and anxiety. The analysis focuses on the word families of bespokoitʹ and trevoga. It is based on data from the Russian-English and English-Russian subcorpora of the Russian National Corpus. These data support the hypothesis that the words in the bespokoitʹ family involve a greater degree of intellectual assessment of the situation, whereas the words in the trevoga family point to a more intense and less uniform emotional experience. At the same time, the study helped verify certain details of earlier descriptions that had been obtained without parallel corpora. The choice of a translation equivalent in each particular case depends not only on semantics but 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 with the English word worry, it is important that the subject is thinking over the situation and considering that it may take a turn for the worse. In the case of trevoga, as with anxiety, a key element is that the subject lacks important knowledge about the situation and therefore does not know what can be done to prevent negative developments. The words vstrevožitʹ and vstrevožitʹsja, like the English word alarmed, are characterized by a sudden realization that something bad might happen and that some action must be taken in response.