Prof. Dr. A.M. Backus

Curriculum Vitae

I have been a Full Professor of Linguistics and Sociolinguistics since September 2011, at Tilburg University in The Netherlands. Before that, I have worked at the same university in various capacities, and held Postdoc fellowships at the University of California at San Diego. I got my PhD in 1996, and have held regular university positions ever since. Gradually, the focus of my work has shifted from an exclusive focus on research to increasing responsibilities in teaching, management, funds acquisition, and supervision of PhD and MA students. In Freiburg, I aim to increase my research time for the duration of my stay.
My publication list reflects my twin main interests over the past years: language contact and cognitive linguistics. I am best known for my work on the linguistic effects of language contact, taking most of my empirical data from Turkish as spoken in The Netherlands, collected during my postdoc projects. In this work I have tried to achieve two things. The first is a more encompassing approach to contact phenomena. I got my start as a researcher on codeswitching; gradually I have expanded my empirical focus to other contact effects as well, with the ambition to account for them in a single coherent framework as the guiding principle. In addition, I have tried to avoid the lack of attention to macro-sociolinguistic factors that is typical of linguistic approaches to language contact, by including them in my gradually developing framework.
The second strand important in my recent work, the seeds of which were visible in earlier work going back to my dissertation, is an attempt to come to grips with the collection of theories referred to as ‘Cognitive Linguistics’, both by using it to account for contact phenomena, as in my work with PhD student Seza Doğruöz, and by working on non-contact-related projects in which this theoretical framework is used. The latter include a project with PhD student Maria Mos, a current project on the ‘building blocks of language’, and work with various Research Master students.
On the whole, my work of the past five years has seen a shift from mostly individual research towards networking and group work. I have been involved in grant applications for the EU and NWO with various Dutch and international partners, am a founding member of a network of researchers on Turkish in immigrant contexts, and do a lot of supervision.