“Threat” in Russian–A Linguistic Perspective

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.