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The words commonly used in English and French to describe people’s resilience in the face of adversity are related to force, movement and stance - literally or metaphorically. Resilience also bears a relationship to time and space, and ultimately to voice, silence and stillness. In this lecture-performance we propose a dynamic re-enactment of the main connections and processes involved.

This paper focuses on the cognitive and semantic difference between HOW and WHAT exclamatives in a literary corpus (two collections of short stories written by Katherine Mansfield and published in 1923, Bliss: and Other Stories and The Garden Party: and Other Stories). A bi-dimensional model of emotion is used (T. Colibazzi et al. [2010], J. Posner et al. [2009]), with valence and arousal being systematically studied, among other cognitive, narrative, semantic and syntactic criteria, to analyse 249 occurrences. WHAT exclamatives mainly serve social purposes and express external perception-based processes and typically have marked valence and low arousal, while HOW exclamatives typically signal strong arousal and neutral valence. The “symbolic” (R. Langacker [2009:1]) meaning of specific parts of speech plays a role in such a semantic distribution: nouns in WHAT exclamative phrases reveal a need to categorize and evaluate, two cognitive operations resulting in an overall simplification of the complexity of the world. HOW exclamatives, on the contrary, display the speaker’s effort to identify and qualify, via the adjectival head, a complex and emotionally charged quale (felt as subjectively unique).

In this paper, –ness nominalization is interpreted as a case of grammatical metaphor, following recent cognitive approaches such as Langacker [2009], Panther et alii [2009]. –ness suffix is one of the most productive suffixes in the English language, because it is “transparent”: it allows the predicative stem to remain fully perceptible within the derived noun. The decategorization process is thus perceptible, giving access to the speaker’s lexical creativity. –ness words are prototypically nonce-words, created by the speaker in a situation whose unique dimension (s)he needs to express; as in lexical metaphors, the transfer of symbolic traits (from the nominal category to the adjective one) leads to a form of concretization. Conceptual Metaphor Theory fails to take this fact into account: all metaphors are motivated by the search of a linguistic difference, which diminishes as metaphors get lexicalized and turn into structural, “conceptual” mapping. Prototypical metaphors are not pre-established cognitive projections. Metaphoricity and lexicalization are opposite evolutive processes.

Metaphors, unlike comparisons, may be perceived as impolite speech acts. This study explains why: I define metaphor as a linguistic utterance in which the speaker appropriates language, such an appropriation taking the risk of being considered as inappropriate. If and only if metaphors fail, i.e do not communicate the precise feeling which prompted them, they give rise to a lasting effect of fuzziness.