37.2672, Reviews: Cognitive Contact Linguistics: Julia Landmann (2026)

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Subject: 37.2672, Reviews: Cognitive Contact Linguistics: Julia Landmann (2026)

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Date: 14-Aug-2026
From: Mohammed Alfatih Alzain Alsheikhidris [mohammed19902009 at gmail.com]
Subject: Julia Landmann (2026)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/37-1835

Title: Cognitive Contact Linguistics
Series Title: Elements in Cognitive Linguistics
Publication Year: 2026

Publisher: Cambridge University Press
           http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics
Book URL:
https://www.cambridge.org/ch/universitypress/subjects/languages-linguistics/cognitive-linguistics/cognitive-contact-linguistics?format=HB&isbn=9781009588133

Author(s): Julia Landmann

Reviewer: Mohammed Alfatih Alzain Alsheikhidris

SUMMARY
Julia Landmann’s “Cognitive Contact Linguistics” arrives as a timely
and necessary intervention at the intersection of two fields that have
rarely engaged in sustained dialogue. On one side, contact linguistics
has produced a rich body of scholarship on borrowing, code‑switching,
and language mixing, but has largely remained within structural,
sociolinguistic, or historical paradigms. On the other, cognitive
linguistics has developed powerful models of usage, entrenchment, and
conceptual structure, yet has only sporadically turned its attention
to multilingual settings. Landmann’s Element, part of Cambridge’s
well‑regarded series, directly addresses this lacuna. Her stated goals
are twofold: to survey the emerging state of the art in “cognitive
contact linguistics,” and to propose a coherent theoretical and
methodological framework that can guide future research.
The book proceeds through an introduction, four thematically organized
case studies (Section 2), and a conclusion with an outlook. The
introduction reframes contact phenomena not as marginal or
exceptional, but as pervasive manifestations of fundamental cognitive
processes: categorization, entrenchment, conceptual integration, and
activation. Section 2.1, drawing on Onysko’s (2019)
reconceptualization of borrowing, code‑switching, transfer, and
replication, examines how contact phenomena manifest in processing and
production. Section 2.2 applies Blank’s (1999) cognitive typology of
semantic change to French‑derived culinary and art terms in English,
demonstrating how borrowings undergo narrowing, metaphorical
extension, and metonymic shift. Section 2.3 adapts Verschik’s (2019)
Code‑Copying Framework to English‑German blog data, revealing the
predominance of nouns, hybrid compounds, and the role of
expressiveness and novelty in motivating copying. Section 2.4 offers
the most integrative contribution, using Schmid’s (2018, 2020)
Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model to show how Latin‑derived
proverbs persist not only through cognitive entrenchment but also
through social prestige, rhetorical function, and emotive‑affective
factors.
The appendices provide valuable supplementary materials, including
lexical tables, a chronological list of proverbs, and classroom‑ready
exercises with solutions. In my assessment, Landmann succeeds in her
primary aim: she demonstrates, convincingly and with empirical
support, that cognitive linguistics has much to offer the study of
language contact. What emerges is not a definitive handbook — the
format precludes that — but a coherent, provocative, and generative
framework that invites both application and critique.
EVALUATION
In my view, the most significant contribution of Landmann’s Element
lies not in any single empirical finding, but in its integrative
vision. She does not merely apply cognitive linguistic tools to
contact data; she constructs a bridge between individual‑level
cognitive processes and community‑level social dynamics. The decision
to foreground Schmid’s Entrenchment and Conventionalization Model in
the final case study is particularly astute, as it allows her to show
how prestige, identity, and contextual factors interact with frequency
and routinization in the life cycle of borrowed items. This dual
perspective is, I believe, the book’s most enduring contribution.
Compared with foundational works in contact linguistics — for
instance, the sociolinguistically oriented frameworks of Thomason
(2001) and Winford (2005), or the structurally focused typologies of
Matras (2009) — Landmann shifts the analytical center of gravity from
external conditions (power asymmetries, migration patterns, social
networks) toward internal cognitive mechanisms (categorization,
activation, entrenchment, and conceptual blending). This is not to say
that she neglects social factors; rather, she repositions them as
forces that shape and are shaped by cognition. In this respect, her
approach aligns with recent calls for a more unified sociocognitive
linguistics (e.g., Geeraerts et al. 2010, Harder 2010), but she pushes
the agenda further by grounding it in detailed, empirically documented
case studies.
That said, the book is not without limitations. One issue, which
Landmann herself acknowledges, is the uneven empirical weight across
the case studies. The first study (Onysko’s framework) is largely
programmatic, the second (French culinary terms) is corpus‑rich but
somewhat mechanical in its application of Blank’s typology, and the
third (blog analysis) is innovative but constrained by a relatively
small and genre‑specific corpus. Only the final study on Latin
proverbs achieves a consistent balance between theoretical depth and
empirical breadth. In my reading, this unevenness suggests that the
book is best understood as a set of connected pilot studies — an
opening gambit rather than a settled synthesis. This is not a weakness
in itself, but it means that future research will need to replicate,
extend, and in some cases contest the findings presented here.
Although each of the four case studies is methodologically transparent
and well‑documented, the diversity of empirical approaches across the
chapters raises a question about overall comparability. Because the
studies rely on different datasets (lexicographic records, corpus
data, blog posts, historical proverb collections), different
analytical procedures, and different units of analysis, the cumulative
evidential force of the proposed cognitive framework is somewhat
difficult to assess holistically. This is not a flaw in any individual
study, but it does mean that the book's overall argument rests on a
set of complementary, rather than fully integrated, pieces of
evidence. Future research could strengthen the framework by applying a
more uniform methodology across multiple contact contexts.
Another limitation is the relatively superficial engagement with
psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research on bilingual processing.
While Landmann cites foundational work by Bialystok (2006), Grosjean
and Li (2013), and Grosjean and Pavlenko (2021), she does not fully
integrate their insights into her analytical framework. For example,
the concepts of inhibitory control, language co‑activation, and the
neural substrates of bilingualism are mentioned in passing but are not
systematically applied to the case studies. Given that cognitive
contact linguistics is, at its core, about the mental processes
underlying multilingual language use, I would argue that a deeper
engagement with experimental and neurocognitive research would have
strengthened the book considerably.
>From a theoretical standpoint, I also wonder whether “cognitive
contact linguistics” is genuinely a new framework, or rather a
re‑branding of existing cognitive linguistic concepts applied to
contact data. Landmann’s synthesis is coherent, and she introduces
useful extensions, but the individual components — usage‑based models,
conceptual blending, prototype theory, construction grammar — are all
well‑established. What is novel is their systematic application to
contact phenomena and their integration under a single sociocognitive
umbrella. In my judgment, this is sufficient to claim novelty, but it
also means that the field remains at an early stage of development.
Future work will need to test whether the framework can generate
falsifiable predictions, accommodate cross‑linguistic variation, and
account for diachronic change beyond the cases studied here.
One promising avenue that remains largely unexplored, and which I
believe intersects with contemporary concerns in both linguistics and
applied fields, is the application of cognitive contact linguistics to
AI‑mediated multilingual communication and neural machine translation.
As translation systems increasingly operate across languages, the
cognitive mechanisms of entrenchment, conceptual blending, and
category formation are no longer solely human phenomena; they are
replicated, accelerated, and transformed in computational models.
Landmann’s framework could, I suggest, be extended to analyze how
translation systems handle contact‑induced features, or how human
translators process borrowed terms and code‑switched elements in real
time. This represents a particularly promising direction for future
inquiry.
Turning to audience, the book will be most valuable for graduate
students and researchers in cognitive linguistics, contact
linguistics, and sociolinguistics who are interested in
cross‑disciplinary synthesis. It is also suitable for advanced
undergraduates, particularly when used with the exercises and
self‑study questions provided in the appendix. The writing is clear
and accessible, and technical terminology is introduced with care. It
could serve as a primary text for a seminar module on language
contact, or as supplementary reading in courses on cognitive
linguistics, bilingualism, or historical linguistics.
Given the constraints of the Cambridge Elements format — which
prioritizes concision, accessibility, and forward‑looking agendas over
exhaustive coverage — Landmann's Element is remarkably successful. It
balances theoretical sophistication with readability, and it presents
a coherent research program without overclaiming. The book exemplifies
the series' aim to provide state‑of‑the‑art overviews that are also
generative of future work.
Finally, I note that the book is well‑produced and carefully edited.
The examples are clearly glossed and translated where necessary, and
the open access availability is a welcome feature that will ensure
wide dissemination, particularly in regions with limited institutional
access to academic monographs.
In sum, Landmann has not simply written an introduction to cognitive
contact linguistics; she has articulated a research agenda that
invites linguists to rethink language contact through the lens of
cognition. Whether future scholars accept this agenda in its current
form or revise it substantially, this Element has already succeeded in
placing cognitive contact linguistics firmly on the disciplinary map.
In the years to come, I expect this Element to become one of the
foundational reference points for future work in cognitive approaches
to language contact — not because it provides all the answers, but
because it asks the right questions and provides a coherent framework
for pursuing them.
REFERENCES
Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy,
and cognition. Cambridge University Press.
Blank, Andreas. 1999. Why do new meanings occur? A cognitive typology
of the motivations for lexical semantic change. In Andreas Blank &
Peter Koch (eds.), Historical Semantics and Cognition, 61–89. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen & Yves Peirsman (eds.). 2010.
Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kristiansen, G., Franco, K., De Pascale, S., Rosseel, L., & Zhang, W.
(Eds.). (2021). Cognitive sociolinguistics revisited (Vol. 48). Walter
de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
Grosjean, François & Ping Li. 2013. The Psycholinguistics of
Bilingualism. Chichester: Wiley‑Blackwell.
Grosjean, François & Aneta Pavlenko. 2021. Life as a Bilingual:
Knowing and Using Two or More Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Harder, Peter. 2010. Meaning in Mind and Society: A Functional
Contribution to the Social Turn in Cognitive Linguistics. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2009. Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues. In
Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds.), Loanwords in the World's
Languages: A Comparative Handbook, 35–54. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Cardoso, H. C. (2012). Yaron Matras, Language contact. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi, 366. Pb. $45. Language in
Society, 41(1), 147-148.
Onysko, Alexander. 2019. Reconceptualizing language contact phenomena
as cognitive processes. In Eline Zenner, Ad Backus & Esme
Winter‑Froemel (eds.), Cognitive Contact Linguistics: Placing Usage,
Meaning and Mind at the Core of Contact‑induced Variation and Change,
23–50. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Poplack, Shana. 2018. Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schmid, Hans‑Jörg. 2018. Ein integratives soziokognitives Modell des
dynamischen Lexikons. In Stefan Engelberg, Henning Lobin, Katrin
Steyer & Sascha Wolfer (eds.), Wortschätze: Dynamik, Muster,
Komplexität, 215–231. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Schmid, Hans‑Jörg. 2020. The Dynamics of the Linguistic System: Usage,
Conventionalization, and Entrenchment. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Thomason, Sarah. 2001. Language Contact: An Introduction. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Verschik, Anna. 2019. English‑Estonian code‑copying in blogs:
Combining a contact linguistic and cognitive approach. In Eline
Zenner, Ad Backus & Esme Winter‑Froemel (eds.), Cognitive Contact
Linguistics: Placing Usage, Meaning and Mind at the Core of
Contact‑induced Variation and Change, 51–80. Berlin: De Gruyter
Mouton.
Winford, Donald. 2005. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Malden:
Blackwell.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Mohammed Alfatih Alzain Alsheikhidris is an Assistant Professor of
Applied Linguistics at the International University of Africa,
Khartoum, Sudan. He previously served as a faculty member at the
School of Oriental Languages, Jilin International Studies University,
Changchun, China. He received his Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from
Yangzhou University, China.
His research and teaching interests include applied linguistics,
Chinese language education, Arabic–Chinese translation and
interpreting, second language acquisition, cognitive linguistics,
language contact, discourse studies, and AI-assisted language learning
and translation.
His research on Arabic–Chinese translation and language contact offers
a practical perspective on multilingualism, cross-linguistic
interaction, and contact-induced language change.



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