[Linganth] Notice of the passing of Deborah Schiffrin

[Michael Lempert]

Dear All,


Deborah Tannen asked that I share this news with our community.


Michael Lempert



Notice of the passing of Deborah Schiffrin

With heavy hearts, we share the sad news that Professor Emerita Deborah 
Schiffrin passed away early on the morning of Thursday July 20. 
Professor Schiffrin was a treasured member of the Georgetown University 
linguistics department faculty from 1982 to 2013, and served as 
department chair from 2003 to 2009. In that capacity, she designed and 
oversaw the department’s Masters in Language and Communication. During 
her years on the faculty, she rose to a position of international 
prominence in our field, helped found and define the field of discourse 
analysis, and mentored many doctoral students who went on to become 
prominent in their own right.


Debby Schiffrin received her BA in sociology from Temple University and 
her PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, where she 
studied with William Labov and Erving Goffman, giants in the fields of 
linguistics and sociology respectively. Her work combined the 
fine-grained analysis of linguistics with sociology’s attention to 
social forces at work in society. This combination was evident, for 
example, in her study of personal narratives told by survivors of the 
Holocaust and of the United States’ internment of Japanese-Americans.


In her first book, /Discourse Markers,/ based on her dissertation, she 
coined the term that became standard in the field, and launched what 
became a fertile subfield of linguistics, as innumerable articles and 
dissertations were written, and continue to be written, on discourse 
markers in English as well as many other languages.In her second book, 
/Approaches to Discourse/, she showed how different branches of 
discourse analysis approach the study of conversation. It immediately 
became and remains a foundational text in the field.

Professor Schiffrin was among the first linguists to pay close attention 
to the way people tell stories in conversation, becoming one of the most 
prominent scholars to examine the role of language in displaying and 
constructing identity in narrative, as in her article “Narrative as 
self-portrait: Sociolinguistic constructions of identity,” and several 
volumes of collected papers on narrative that she co-edited. Her work on 
these and many other topics continue to be widely cited.

All who knew, worked with, or studied with Deborah Schiffrin know that 
her brilliant intellect was matched by her quietly unassuming manner 
and unfailing kindness. She will be sorely missed. Condolences may be 
sent to her husband, Dr. Louis Scavo, and her children, David and Laura 
Scavo, at 5125 Baltan Road, Bethesda, MD 20816.In lieu of flowers, the 
family suggests that donations may be made in her memory to The 
Alzheimer’s Association http://www.alz.org/  A memorial will be held at 
Georgetown in the fall.

Deborah Tannen and Heidi Hamilton

-- 

michael lempert | anthropology | michigan

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/linganth/attachments/20170724/034f458d/attachment.htm>