Dr Roberto B. Sileo

PhD MPhil MJur JD BA BA

College position:

Fellow, Director of Studies in Linguistics, Postgraduate Tutor and Praelector

Roberto B. Sileo
Roberto B. Sileo

Roberto is the Fellow and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Homerton College, Cambridge, where he is also a Postgraduate Tutor and Praelector. He is also an Affiliated Lecturer in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics.

Roberto’s research has looked into the use and interpretation of descriptive and expressive language in everyday conversational exchanges. Following a contextualist approach to natural language interpretation, he analysed descriptiveness and expressiveness as two well-differentiated dimensions of meaning and how they can contribute, in context, to propositional and truth-evaluable content. Roberto’s current interests include bilingualism and first and second language processing, in particular, anaphoric pronoun resolution by monolingual and bilingual speakers of English.

Roberto holds a PhD and an MPhil in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics from the University of Cambridge. He also holds a degree in English Language Teaching from the Asociación Argentina de Cultura Inglesa and Law degrees from the University of Oxford and the University of Buenos Aires. 

Research Interests

Bilingualism. First and second language processing. Pragmatics. Semantics.

Teaching And Professional Interests

Bilingualism. English language teaching and assessment. First and second language processing. Pragmatics. Semantics. Research method practice.

Links to online publications, articles or other work

Sileo, R.B., Cilibrasi, L., Heine, J. and Tsimpli, I.M. (under review). The role of aspect on anaphora resolution in English as first and second language. 

Sileo, R. B. & Jaszczolt, K.M. (2021). Towards a conceptual-semantic model of cross-sentential anaphora. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics 13, 63-97.

Jaszczolt, K. M. & Sileo, R. B. (2021). Pragmatics and Grammar as Sources of Temporal Ordering in Discourse: The Case of And. In Macagno, F. & Capone, A. (Eds.) Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics: Issues in Linguistics, 53-81.

Sileo, R.B. & Tyčová, D. (2019). Czech-Rep: Introducing a nonword repetition task for Czech. Studies in Applied Linguistics 10(2), 101-107.

Sileo, R.B. (2018a). Slurs, truth-value judgements, and context-sensitivity. Human Affairs 28(1), 17-23.

Sileo, R.B. (2018b). The semantics and pragmatics of racial and ethnic slurs: Towards a psychologically real contextualist account. Cambridge Occasional Papers in Linguistics 11, 86-119.

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