ABSTRACT
This chapter treats ‘convergence’ broadly − namely, as a fundamental phenomenon for all kinds of contact situations − from a sociolinguistic and a cognitive point of view, from a macro- and micro-areal, and from a diatopic and a diastratic perspective. After clarifying basic premises and a historical survey of related notions in different linguistic subdisciplines, the chapter focuses on the relation between (areal) typology, dialectology, and sociolinguistics, and on what can be called ‘identification models’ in recent approaches, including implicational hierarchies and metatypy. The chapter closes with a justification and appeal for usage-based methods and token-based analyses.
