The Role of Contact in Explaining Linguistic Convergence ¹

In this paper, I explore the question of how linguistic convergence emerges and what the role of contact might be. My case study is the spread of headed relative clauses built around wh ‐relative markers in the Standard Average European languages. Given the spread of such relative clauses, and their presence in Hittite and Middle Persian, as well as evidence that they emerged through language‐internal processes in English and Hungarian, I argue that there is no evidence for contact, in particular borrowing, being the driver of the contemporary distribution of such relative clauses. Moreover, when you examine the various contexts of contact, to the extent that this is possible, it appears that arguments from contact should not be drawn upon, because the different contact situations indicate that there should have been different contact outputs.