Deborah Schiffrin

Deborah Sue Schiffrin (May 30, 1951 – July 20, 2017) was an American linguist who researched areas of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, producing seminal work on the topic of English discourse markers.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, she earned a B.A. in sociology from Temple University (1972), an MA in sociology also from Temple University (1975), and her PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania (1982) under the supervision of William Labov. Schiffrin taught at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and at the University of California in Berkeley California.

Throughout her career, Schiffrin wrote four books, edited five books, published over 51 articles and book chapters, and supervised 44 successful Ph.D. dissertations, plus acted as a reader on 35 more. She served on the faculty at Georgetown University from 1982 to 2013 teaching sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics, serving as chair of the department from 2003 to 2009. As department chair, Schiffrin designed the department's Masters in Language and Communication program.

Schiffrin served on the editorial board of academic journals including ''Language in Society, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Communication, Discourse Processes, Pragmatics'', ''Discourse Studies,'' and ''Storyworlds'', as well as the John Benjamins Publishing Company's academic book series Pragmatics and Beyond New Series.

From personal words spoken with Alexandra Johnston, Schiffrin stated that the three main influential people of her academic career were, Noam Chomsky, William Labov, and Erving Goffman. Thus, her areas of interest included sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language interaction, narrative analysis, grammar in interaction, language and identity, and discourse and history. Her expertise however lay within discourse markers. Provided by Wikipedia