Semantic Tectonics: Writing Studies, Intersubjectivity, and the End of Solipsism (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781646429516)

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 brings together insights from a range of important scholars who have advanced 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, critical-discourse and content--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 as sites for ideological and pedagogical intervention.