
Phone number: +44 (0)1223 335010
Email: rbs30@cam.ac.uk
Dr Roberto B. Sileo
Roberto B. Sileo investigates the meaning of words, phrases, and sentences both in isolation and in actual linguistic interaction. He is currently looking into how bilingual children acquire and interpret language.
Academic interests
Roberto B. Sileo’s academic interests include:
- Bilingualism
- Philosophy of Language
- Pragmatics
- Semantics.
Degrees obtained
- BA, UBA.
- BA, AACI.
- Magister Juris, Oxon.
- MPhil, Cantab.
- PhD, Cantab.
Biography
Roberto B. Sileo is a linguist, an educator, and a lawyer. As a member of the Prague and Cambridge Primus Group, Roberto is currently working on the syntax/semantics interface within the ‘Core Syntax in Bilingual Children’ project.
Roberto’s past research focused on the use and interpretation of descriptive and expressive language and he was also the research associate on ‘Rethinking Being Gricean: New Challenges for Metapragmatics’, a project funded by a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant.
Other interests
Photography, travelling, cooking.
Department link
https://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/rbs30Publications, links and resources
- Sileo, R.B. & Tycova, 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.
- Jaszczolt, K. M. & Sileo, R. B. (Forthcoming). Pragmatics and grammar as sources of temporal ordering in discourse: The case of and. In Macagno, F. and Capone, A. (eds.) Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics (Springer).
- Sileo, R. B. & Jaszczolt, K.M. (In progress). Discourse reference assignment and the grammar/inference distinction.
- Sileo, R.B. (In progress). Anaphoric pronoun resolution in ambiguous verb-of-transfer contexts: A time-reaction study.