[12] 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.
[9] Thus, her areas of interest included sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, language interaction, narrative analysis, grammar in interaction, language and identity, and discourse and history.
[9] She looked at several different characteristics of discourse markers including: syntactic position, grammatical, stress, phonological reduction, and tone.
[13] She conducted her analysis by interviewing primarily Jewish Americans in Philadelphia about their lives.
[9] From this investigative work Schiffrin developed and published her book Approaches to Discourse in 1994.