Semantic Tectonics offers an engaging contribution to the ongoing conversation about the alliances of convenience and fissiparous relations among second-language writing, rhetoric, technical and professional communication, composition, and basic writing. From a theoretical perspective, the book unites a cross-section of significant work advancing relational alternatives to Cartesian dualisms of mind and body, self and other, thought and language. Naming these dualisms “solipsism,” the book extends these alternatives into empirical inquiries into the lexicogrammar of contemporary writing studies scholarship, using corpus analytics to bolster, and sometimes challenge, content-analytic and critical-discourse analytic approaches.
With frequent pauses to explain and model corpus tools and applications to pose questions for further inquiry and to contemplate pedagogical or civic applications, Semantic Tectonics shows how the field’s social mission is constrained by tacit beliefs about critical concepts like language, self, context, genre, reflection, agency, and development. By foregrounding the empirical study of patterns in language itself, this book inspires readers to shift their perspective to the operational significance of word- and phrase-level discourse discourse as sites for ideological and pedagogical intervention.