28.3206, All: Obituary: Deborah Schiffrin

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-3206. Wed Jul 26 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.3206, All: Obituary: Deborah Schiffrin

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Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2017 23:15:35
From: Luke Plonsky [lukeplonsky at gmail.com]
Subject: Obituary: 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
 


Linguistic Field(s): Not Applicable



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