Sarah D’Antonio, Junior Membership Officer
Sarah D’Antonio is responsible for assisting the Senior Membership Officer with managing member business and files.
Bio: Sarah earned her doctorate in Linguistics at Cornell University in 2018. She received her Master’s Degree in Linguistics from Cornell University in 2016, and her B.A. in Linguistics from Princeton University in 2013. Her main research interest is exploring fairness issues that arise from ambiguous and vague language in United States statutes, contracts, and jury instructions. Her doctoral dissertation explored the meaning and use of the word “reasonable” in state jury instructions. The study utilizes three different perspectives: theoretical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and experimentation. Her Master’s thesis dealt with ambiguity in the interpretation of the word “or” in the U.S. Perjury Statute. In her free time, Sarah enjoys baking cheesecakes, bowling, and singing with her a cappella group, “Cornell University Less Than Three”.
Sara Bartl, Junior Media Officer
Sara Bartl is responsible for assisting the media reviews and updates posted in the GSFL quarterly newsletter.
Bio: Sara is currently in the last year of her Undergraduate Degree, studying Linguistics and Antiquity at University College Roosevelt (part of Utrecht University), The Netherlands. In previous papers she has researched face and politeness strategies in suicide notes as well as the performance of identity through negation in death row statements. Her BA thesis will use corpus linguistics to investigate the style of Julia Donaldson’s picture books and in how far the linguistic evidence aligns with popular media reviews. Currently, Sara is working with Patricia Canning on a project assessing the utility of Text World Theory and the annotation and visualization software Worldbuilder for the analysis of forensic texts, which is part of Patricia Canning’s research into witness statements following the Hillsborough disaster in 1989.