This article explores the notions of $\mathcal {F}$-transitivity and topological $\mathcal {F}$-recurrence for backward shift operators on weighted $\ell ^p$-spaces and $c_0$-spaces on directed trees, where $\mathcal {F}$ represents a Furstenberg family of subsets of $\mathbb {N}_0$. In particular, we establish the equivalence between recurrence and hypercyclicity of these operators on unrooted directed trees. For rooted directed trees, a backward shift operator is hypercyclic if and only if it possesses an orbit of a bounded subset that is weakly dense.

We obtain the representation of the backward shift operator on Chebyshev polynomials involving a principal value (PV) integral. Twice the backward shift on the space of square-summable sequences l2 displays chaotic dynamics, thus we provide an explicit form of a chaotic operator on L2 (−1, 1, (1−x2)–1/2) using Cauchy’s PV integral. We explicitly calculate the periodic points of the operator and provide examples of unbounded trajectories, as well as chaotic ones. Histograms and recurrence plots of shifts of random Chebyshev expansions display interesting behaviour over fractal measures.

We prove that a random function in the Hardy space $H^2$ is a non-cyclic vector for the backward shift operator almost surely. The question of existence of a local pseudocontinuation for a random analytic function is also studied.

A bounded linear operator $T$ on a Banach space $X$ is an abstract backward shift if the nullspace of $T$ is one dimensional, and the union of the null spaces of ${{T}^{k}}$ for all $k\,\ge \,1$ is dense in $X$. In this paper it is shown that the commutant of an abstract backward shift is an integral domain. This result is used to derive properties of operators in the commutant.