“Threat” in Russian – A Linguistic Perspective

ABSTRACT

The present study explores a frequent concept in modern media discourse, namely “threat,” based on a corpus analysis of the two Russian nouns groza and ugroza from 1800 to 2020. We show that the two words share a network of submeanings, but that they have different centers of gravity in the network. We identify four submeanings and suggest that the distribution of the two words has changed over time. In present-day Russian, groza is dominant in the meaning ‘thunderstorm,’ while ugroza describes a wide variety of threats. Our analysis of origins of threats and affected entities has also revealed a diachronic development, whereby origins of threat change from concrete physical threats via military threats to more generalized dangers, such as nuclear and environmental disasters, diseases, and terrorism, while entities affected by these threats undergo a change from concrete persons via communities and states to the entire planet.

KEYWORDS:

• threat
• Russian
• radial category
• metaphor
• metonymy
• language change

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

2 See for instance, the “National threat assessment” issued by the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST, file:///Users/tne000/Downloads/_globalassets_artikler_trusselvurderinger_nasjonal-trusselvurdering-2021_ntv_2021_final_web_1802-1.pdf) and the corresponding Swedish document issued by the National Center for Terrorist Threat Assessment (https://www.sakerhetspolisen.se/download/18.f2735ce171767402ba3eb/1600433792019/NCT-one-year-assessment-2020.pdf). The Russian government publishes their strategy for national security: O strategii nacional’noj bezopasnosti Rossijskoj federacii (http://www.kremlin.ru/acts/bank/40391).

3 All numbered examples in this article are from the Russian National Corpus available at www.ruscorpora.ru. Examples are given in transliterated orthography. We provide the name of the author for examples from fiction and the name of the periodical for examples from non-fiction. For all examples, the year when it was created is included. The nouns under scrutiny are boldfaced in each example.

4 Notably, the Russian Constructicon (an online database over Russian grammatical constructions, https://constructicon.github.io/russian/) uses “threat” as a semantic tag. Letučij (2007), who refers to Mel’chuk 1987), has coined the term ugrozativ for linguistic means that conveys threats. For a detailed analysis of constructions expressing threat in Russian, see Zhukova (2023).

5 Corpus searches were performed in December 2020. The dataset is available at: https://doi.org/10.18710/SLQUMQ.

6 Notice, however, that substitution with ugroza in (4) would require the plural form of the word. It seems that groza in the plural is only used in the meteorological sense of ‘thunderstorm,’ to which we return in section 5. Ugroza, on the other hand, can be used in the plural to describe separate expressions of threat. We are indebted to an anonymous referee for pointing this out.

7 An anonymous referee comments that groza would be infelicitous in example (7), because groza requires non-referential NP adjuncts. According to the referee, groza ljubych zagovorščikov ‘threat to any conspirators’ is better than groza učastnikov perevorota ‘threat to the participants in the coup.’ While this seems to be a tendency, the Russian National Corpus does contain counterexamples, suggesting that at least some language users accept groza with referential NPs. A case in point is the following example, where a concrete ice hockey team feels threatened by their coach: Charlamov vytiral slëzy, Tret’jak iskrenne veril, čto k nim prišla govorjaščaja sobaka, groza sbornoj trener Tarasov počti sjusjukal: “Psina, nu skaži ešče slovečko.” ‘Charlamov wiped his tears, Tret’jak sincerely believed that a speaking dog had arrived, Tarasov, a threat to the national team, talked to the dog like to a baby: “doggie, say another word.”’ (Izvestija 2001)

8 For instance, the cognates in Czech (hrůza), Slovak (hrôza), and Polish (groza) are not used in the meteorological sense. For ‘thunderstorm,’ Czech uses bouřka, Slovak búrka, and Polish burza. A more detailed investigation of the relevant words across the Slavic languages is beyond the scope of the present study.

9 The fact that a meteorological term for bad weather is used metaphorically is not surprising. Other examples include burja ‘storm’ and štorm ‘storm.’ However, since these words are not directly relevant for the concept of “threat,” we will not discuss them in the present study.

10 Notice that the examples in our study are classified on the basis of the sentence itself in its immediate context. In examples of “generalized threats” like (9), it is possible that the extended context could provide insights about the specific properties of the threat. However, since our study is a quantitative investigation of a large dataset, it was not possible to analyze extended contexts for each individual example.

11 The notion of “prototype” has received a number of slightly different definitions in cognitive linguistics (see, e.g., Rosch 1973 and 1975; Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2007; Geeraerts 2006/1989). Detailed discussion of all these definitions is beyond the scope of the present study.

12 In order to facilitate comparison across time periods, the raw numbers from our database were extrapolated in the following way. Our random samples consist of approximately 500 examples for each word in each time period. We have compared the number of examples from the samples to the total number of attestations of groza and ugroza in each period and estimated the number of relevant examples in the whole corpus for that period. This extrapolation was carried out for all periods after 1850. For the earlier periods, we analyzed all attestations of groza and ugroza. The basis for the extrapolation can be seen from the following table:

Table

We have used this extrapolation method throughout the article. Since the numbers for 1700–1799 are low and do not provide enough data for comparison, they are not included in the tables and figures elsewhere in this article.

13 CoCoCo is freely available at https://cococo.cosyco.ru/.

14 The Taiga corpus is freely available at https://tatianashavrina.github.io/taiga_site/.

15 Notice that the collocations we describe in this section sometimes involve syntactic constructions that support certain metonymical or metaphorical readings. For instance, the use of groza/ugroza as the syntactic subject of verbs of hanging (e.g., viset’) supports a metaphorical understanding of a threat as a dangerous object hanging over a person. However, a detailed investigation of the relationship between metaphor and metonymy on the one hand and syntactic constructions on the other is beyond the scope of the present study.