prof. dr. Albert Backus

Bio

I have been at Tilburg University since the 1990's and am now a professor in the Department of Culture Studies. I work on multiculturalism, more specifically on how it affects people's communication habits and their language use. I teach about these topics in the BA and MA programs Online Culture and in the Research MA that Tilburg shares with Radboud University Nijmegen, on Language and Communication. I'm also one of the coordinators of that program. In my research I work together with PhD students and colleagues here and abroad, and I am currently the editor of an international journal on bilingualism.  My main scientific interest is in how to combine the many different academic disciplines that, often independently, contribute insights about multiculturalism, and how to translate that into my teaching.

Courses

• Grant Proposal Writing
• Usage Based Approaches to Knowledge
• The Multicultural Individual
• Language, Culture and Globalization

Recent publications

1. Comparing forward and reverse transfer from Dutch to German

   Barking, M., Mos, M., & Backus, A. (2022). Comparing forward and reverse transfer from Dutch to German. International Journal of Bilingualism, 26(4), 389-404.

2. Individual corpus data predict variation in judgments - Testing the u…

   Barking, M., Backus, A., & Mos, M. (2022). Individual corpus data predict variation in judgments: Testing the usage-based nature of mental representations in a language transfer setting. Cognitive Linguistics, 33(3), 481-519.

3. Similarity in Language Transfer - Investigating Transfer of Light Ver…

   Barking, M., Mos, M., & Backus, A. (2022). Similarity in Language Transfer: Investigating Transfer of Light Verb Constructions From Dutch to German. Journal of Language Contact, 15(1), 198-239.

4. Usage-based approaches to child code-switching - State of the art and…

   Gaskins, D., Quick, A. E., Verschik, A., & Backus, A. (2022). Usage-based approaches to child code-switching: State of the art and ways forward. Cognitive Development, 64, [101269].

5. A Usage-Based approach to pattern finding - The traceback method meet…

   Quick, A. E., & Backus, A. (2022). A Usage-Based approach to pattern finding: The traceback method meets code-mixing. Languages, 7(2), [135].