A corpus-based study of the Ukrainian emotion concept benteha — a complex, diffuse, “bittersweet” feeling — built by comparing its metaphorical profile with the semantically related German concepts angst and sehnsucht.
The article identifies the cross-cultural specificity of the Ukrainian emotion concept benteha by comparing its metaphorical profile with those of the semantically related German concepts angst and sehnsucht.
The comparative dimension of the study is motivated by the “dual” nature of the EC benteha, as it constitutes a complex and diffuse phenomenon encompassing a range of both negative and positive emotional experiences, including metaphysical fear, subconscious anxiety, embarrassment, agitation, interest, arousal (sexual desire), fascination, and amorous passion. It has been established that through its “bitter” semantic dimension, the EC benteha exhibits similarity to the German-specific EC angst, which conveys metaphysical fear (eeriness), anxiety, and vague foreboding. By contrast, through its “sweet” dimension, this concept exhibits similarities to the German-specific EC sehnsucht, as the latter represents a “bitter-sweet” emotion in which “sweet,” unsettling desires and dreams are closely intertwined with their “bitter” utopian prospect.
The metaphorical profiles of the compared ECs were modelled on the basis of a quantitative analysis of source domains (SDs) underlying 14 conceptual metaphors. The data were obtained through manual analysis of automatically generated concordances with the keywords benteha, Angst, and Sehnsucht extracted from the GRAC-19 and the DWDS-Kernkorpus 21 corpora. The analysis revealed substantial differences in the metaphorical profiles of the compared ECs in terms of the relevance of SDs; the few partial overlaps identified are based on fragmentary similarities between benteha, on the one hand, and angst, and, on the other hand, sehnsucht.
The EC benteha is extensively metaphorised in Ukrainian culture both as a burden and as sweets (SD food), clearly demonstrating its ambivalent nature. Yet the high frequency of the collocation nepozbuvna benteha (“persistent anxiety”) makes a burden its most relevant source domain (28.88%) — indicating the dominance of negative meanings. Verification through source-domain valence confirmed that sehnsucht is more positive (25.65%) than benteha (19.77%), while angst is almost entirely negative.
A diffuse, “bittersweet” emotion uniting anxiety, agitation, fear, interest, and joy — at once agitating and calming the “restless Ukrainian soul.”
Conveys metaphysical fear (eeriness), anxiety, and a vague sense of foreboding — and, unlike benteha, may also denote physical fear.
A “bitter-sweet” longing in which sweet desires and dreams are inextricably intertwined with the bitter prospect of their unattainability or utopia.
Cognitive linguistics treats emotion concepts (ECs) as cultural rather than universal — yet specifically Ukrainian emotions remain largely unstudied, even by Ukrainians themselves.
In cognitive linguistics, the notion of the “emotion concept” emerged as an alternative to the basic emotion theory in psychology. Rather than searching for universal basic emotions, culture-oriented fields regard ECs primarily as cultural or ethnopsychological concepts, on the view that the perception and linguistic expression of emotions differ among members of different cultures, since culture affects the ways in which languages are used to express emotion. The analysis of ethnically and linguoculturally marked ECs thus makes it possible to identify specific meanings that point to the distinctive features of the psychotype of a particular culture.
Against the background of growing interest among Ukrainian linguists in emotions, there is an almost total absence of studies devoted to ECs that represent specifically Ukrainian emotions. There is not even a basic list of specifically Ukrainian emotions. Paradoxically, these emotions exist in Ukrainian culture, yet they are largely ignored by Ukrainians themselves — a striking example being the emotion denoted by the lexeme benteha.
The relevance of this emotion is largely due to the expression nepozbuvna benteha (“persistent anxiety”), coined by O. Korol, the translator of J. Fowles’ novel The Magus. Its obscurity sparked a heated debate over translation quality — and the phrase became an internet meme, raising the question of how to translate literary works in a way that is both accessible to modern readers and faithful to the author’s style.
Whereas people in other cultures may feel embarrassment, nervousness, restlessness, or anxiety, for Ukrainians it is pervasive — benteha. The ambivalent, “bittersweet” nature of the emotion is revealed in the way nothing agitates and calms the restless Ukrainian soul at the same time quite like it. Psychologists, however, dispute this “naïve” perception, classifying it within the emotional cluster of sadness — a state of inner restlessness when a person senses that something is wrong but cannot determine its source.
Which conceptual metaphors are the most relevant in the metaphorical profiles of the ECs benteha, angst and sehnsucht, and which of them clearly indicate the cultural specificity of the EC benteha?
How differently are the compared ECs perceived in their respective cultures in terms of valence, and which of the ambivalent concepts is more positive — benteha or sehnsucht?
The cross-cultural specificity of any EC is most clearly revealed through comparison with concepts close to it in semantic content. Profiles were built from two comparable corpora using a combined metaphor-identification procedure.
Since nouns exhibit a greater propensity for metaphorisation, concordances were compiled by entering the nominative designations of the emotions — Ukr. benteha and Germ. Angst and Sehnsucht — into the Ukrainian corpus GRAC (General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian; GRAC-19) and the German DWDS-Kernkorpus des 21. Jahrhunderts. The German corpus was chosen to ensure comparability by type, size, and — most importantly — genre: only its genre-compatible Belletristik (fiction) and Zeitung (newspaper) texts were used, while Wissenschaft and Gebrauchsliteratur were excluded.
After removing repetitions, non-metaphorical and homonymous uses, and “dead” metaphors, a share of each cleaned sample was identified as metaphorical via the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) combined with metaphorical pattern analysis (MPA).
Raw → cleaned → metaphorical contexts: benteha 584 → 497 → 187 (37.63%); Angst 1920 → 1623 → 514 (31.67%); Sehnsucht 422 → 386 → 191 (49.48%).
Determine, through contextual analysis, the content of the Ukrainian EC benteha and compare it with the main semantic clusters of the German ECs angst and sehnsucht.
Identify, through manual analysis of automatically generated concordances, the metaphorical conceptualisation of each emotion — thereby establishing their metaphorical profiles.
Determine cross-cultural specificity by comparing the profiles and establishing the valence of the source domains of the metaphors representing each EC.
An abstract emotion (the target domain) is grasped through more concrete source domains. The study uses metaphors most typical for ECs in general, of the form emotion is X, so the three profiles stay strictly comparable. Each card shows that domain’s relevance (%) in all three concepts.
The EC benteha is represented by five core clusters. As a consequence of this multidimensionality, speakers of Ukrainian tend to have a rather vague and often diffuse understanding of what they experience.
Benteha expresses uncertainty, anxiety, or sadness arising from difficult circumstances or internal conflicts. It is characteristic of situations in which a person worries not only about their own fate but about the fate of others — even of an entire nation — so it may function as collective pain or empathy, transmitted through shared experiences, including the current Russian-Ukrainian war. Its meanings of subconscious anxiety closely correlate with profound, metaphysical fear, aligning it with German angst.
Benteha also names a “sweetly disturbing” experience — sexual desire expressed through attraction to a partner, arousal, or even amorous passion. This dimension remains largely unfamiliar to a considerable part of Ukrainian culture, confirming the emotion’s elusive nature. These “sweet” meanings — anticipation of positive events, joyful bewilderment, the pleasant sensation of passion — underlie its similarity to German sehnsucht.
Concordance lines from GRAC, reproduced with the authors’ English glosses, showing the emotion’s opposing charges.
[…] а вона дослухалася лише незрозумілої бентеги свого єства
‘[…] but she listened only to the incomprehensible anxiety of her being’.
Це маркер національної непозбувної бентеги
‘This is a marker of national persistent anxiety’.
Прогнозую попервах непозбувну бентегу, а то й панічний розпач, страх та ненависть вчителів-русистів
‘I predict persistent anxiety, and even panic, despair, fear and hatred among teachers of Russian language and literature’.
Він аж захлинався від ніжності, від гарячої душевної бентеги
‘He was overwhelmed with tenderness, with hot soulful desire’.
Я вже вся палаю від бентеги
‘I am already burning with desire’.
Моя солодка бентега
‘My sweet desire’.
The relevance of the 14 source domains (Table 1) reveals more divergences than similarities. Within benteha, the most salient domains are a burden (28.88%) and a physical object (15.51%).
Percentage of metaphorical occurrences mapped to each source domain, for benteha, angst and sehnsucht. The radial “shape” is each concept’s metaphorical signature.
Each source domain compared across the three concepts (%).
Its own profile, ranked. The dominant burden against the warm, “sweet” domains of heat/fire and food captures the ambivalence at a glance.
The dominance of a burden in benteha (28.88%, against only 3.11% in angst and 3.14% in sehnsucht) is driven by the frequent collocation nepozbuvna benteha and its variants. The perception of this emotion as something difficult to get rid of has largely shaped its overall negative evaluation. By contrast, heat/fire (8.56%) and the relatively high food (4.28%) reflect the positive, “sweet” cluster of amorous passion. The single similarity between benteha and angst is the high share of a physical object (15.51% vs 23.15%) — emotions conceptualised as objects that can be transferred, received, sown, or dulled.
Але річ не в ньому, а в тій бентезі, яку він посіяв у мою юнацьку душу
‘But it’s not about him, it’s about the turmoil he sowed in my young soul’.
Mit jedem Schritt wuchs ihre Sehnsucht, sich einfach fallen zu lassen
‘With every step, her longing to just let go grew stronger’.
Und ich bekam Sehnsucht nach der Sehnsucht von einst
‘And I longed for the longing of yesteryear’.
| # & abbr. | Source domain | benteha N=187 | % | angst N=514 | % | sehnsucht N=191 | % |
|---|
Lacunae: benteha has no instances of a goal; sehnsucht lacks both cold and a wild (captured) animal. All 14 domains are instantiated only in angst.
Valence — the (un)pleasantness of an emotional experience — was established manually for every contextual occurrence. The mean positive and negative shares (Table 2) verify which ambivalent concept is more positive.
Positive (sweet, right) versus negative (bitter, left) share of metaphorical contexts. Sehnsucht emerges as the most positive of the three; angst is almost entirely negative.
The mean valence values confirm the more positive profile of sehnsucht (25.65% positive) compared with benteha (19.77% positive). The positive meanings associated with sexual desire and concealed wishes do not compensate for the predominantly negative perception of benteha, where the emotion is conceptualised as a persistent burden and is further intensified by subconscious anxiety and metaphysical fear permeating a wide range of domains. Similar meanings have produced an almost entirely negative profile for angst (only 0.58% positive). Like benteha, sehnsucht is ambivalent — but, unlike it, can represent emotional nuances that individuals actively seek and wish to experience again.
sehnsucht 25.65% › benteha 19.77% › angst 0.58%. The procedure also substantiated the relatively higher positive valence of benteha over angst, the latter exhibiting near-total negative valence through the dominance of subconscious anxiety and metaphysical fear.
| # | SD | бентега pc% | nc% | angst pc% | nc% | sehnsucht pc% | nc% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| mean (x̄) | 19.77 | 80.21 | 0.58 | 99.38 | 25.65 | 74.32 | |
Here pc = positive context; nc = negative context. The sum of mean values approximates but does not reach 100%, as the valence indices for each SD were rounded to the hundredths place.
Despite overlapping, on one side, with the ambivalent sehnsucht and, on the other, with the predominantly negative angst, the metaphorical conceptualisation of benteha clearly demonstrates the cultural specificity of the concept it represents.
In Ukrainian culture benteha is metaphorised both as a burden and as something sweet (food), which clearly reflects its ambivalent nature.
A burden is the most relevant domain, and almost all of benteha’s domains are represented by metaphors that conceptualise anxiety and fear — indicating a predominance of negative meanings.
The ambivalent sehnsucht is more positively charged, owing either to the absence of explicitly negative domains or to their low salience (e.g. an opponent/enemy or a burden).
Valence indices confirm that sehnsucht is more positive than benteha, while angst shows an almost entirely negative valence dominated by subconscious anxiety and metaphysical fear.
The prospects of the present study lie in further refining the corpus-based methodology, which would make it possible to identify and conduct an in-depth analysis of other culture-specific emotion concepts in Ukrainian culture.