The The Polysemy of Resilience Across Physical, Medical, and Everyday English Discourse and its Implications for Patient-Centered Health Communication

Abstract

This study examines how the polysemous senses of “resilience” are distributed across registers in present-day American English and what that distribution implies for patient-centered health communication. Although the term is frequently invoked in American clinical practice, the behavior of its senses across discourse types remains underexplored, posing a risk of semantic misalignment between clinician intent and patient comprehension. A lexicographic reconstruction, in which three present-day dictionary senses were operationalized through diagnostic collocate cues, was combined with a corpus analysis of 17,243 concordance instances from the Corpus of Contemporary American English. Four sub-corpora were built, three sense-specific sets from the Health and Medicine register and a daily-usage benchmark, and analyzed in AntConc and R using Log-Likelihood and chi-square statistics. The psychological and systemic senses predominate, the former in medical discourse and the latter in academic and institutional discourse while the original physical sense accounts for 1.5 percent of resolved instances. A chi-square test of independence supported the collocational separation of the three senses, Cramér’s V = .86, and 53.6 percent of everyday instances remained contextually underspecified, reflecting a stylistic broadening into a generalized rhetoric of virtue. Clinicians can therefore frame “resilience” with process-oriented collocates such as “build” or “coping,” though corpus distributions cannot be read directly as clinical comprehension and require experimental confirmation.