HomeAbstract of 11th-rssconfThe Polysemy of “Resilience” Across Physical, Medical, and Everyday English Discourse and Its Implications for Patient’ Centered Health Communication

The Polysemy of “Resilience” Across Physical, Medical, and Everyday English Discourse and Its Implications for Patient’ Centered Health Communication

  • Jun 22, 2026
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Abstract Book of the 11th International Conference on Research in Social Sciences

Year: 2026

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The Polysemy of “Resilience” Across Physical, Medical, and Everyday English Discourse and Its Implications for Patient’ Centered Health Communication

Huy Pham, Nguyen Le Ai Duyen

ABSTRACT:

“Resilience” has passed polysemic expansion from the 17th-century materials science origins to the fields of psychology, ecology, public health, and ordinary English (Harper, n.d.; Southwick et al., 2014). Currently, it plays a role as a load-bearing therapeutic prompt in American medical discourse (Ang et al., 2023; Bryant & Aggleton, 2025; Schellekens et al., 2024). Although there are some clinical risks related to patients having to opt between the older mechanical sense of passive springback and the newer psychological sense of active adaptation (Gurumurthy et al., 2025; Southwick et al., 2014), the distribution of these semantic classes in today’s registers has not been researched in detail. Therefore, this study addresses that gap through lexicographic and corpus-based analysis of four sub-corpora comprising 17,243 KWIC instances from the English Corpora. Through the analysis, diagnostic collocates and clusters were identified for each Cambridge Dictionary sense, and a Pearson Chi-square test on a 3 by 38 sense-by-collocate contingency table confirmed that the sense profiles are statistically separable, χ²(74, N = 4,607) = 6,905.65, p < .001, and Cramér’s V = .86. In the Daily-Usage sub-corpus, the Psychological sense accounted for 26.5 percent of instances, the Systemic sense for 15.7 percent, and the Physical sense for only 0.6 percent, with a goodness-of-fit test confirming departure from a uniform distribution, χ²(2, N = 4,683) = 2,580.85, p < .001. Finally, the findings provide the evidence base for patient-centered health communication, clinician training, and ESP curricula by way of predicting comprehension asymmetries surrounding high-frequency therapeutic vocabulary like “resilience.”

Keywords: Collocation Analysis; Concordance; Lexicographic Analysis; Polysemy; Semantic Change