Abstract
Late Middle High German experienced a process of fricative dissimilation in which /x/ () became /k/ before /s/ (e.g. MHG vu[xs] > NHG Fu[ks] ‘fox’). A comparative study of Bavarian dialects and the Southern Bavarian variety of Hutterisch (a Germanic language island in Canada and the U.S.A.) shows that this process exhibits effects of domain narrowing: fricative dissimilation applies at the phrase level in Hutterisch (i[k s]iech, ‘I see’), at the word level in some Bavarian varieties (brau[k]-st, ‘need 2P.SG’), and at the stem level in others (Tyrolean Fu[ks], ‘fox’; similarly in Modern Standard German). This retreating of phonological processes to increasingly smaller morphosyntactic domains is interpreted as an example of the life cycle of phonological processes in the sense of Bermúdez-Otero (2007, 2015), Bermúdez- Otero & Trousdale (2012). Data for Hutterisch are elicited from three speakers for all relevant morphosyntactic domains and for contexts where /x/ precedes fricatives other than /s/. The acoustic and perceptual analysis carried out reveals that, differently from other Bavarian varieties, Hutterisch is undergoing a process of rule generalisation by which fricative dissimilation can be triggered also by the fricatives /ʃ/ and /f/ (i[k ʃ]piel, ‘I play’, i[k f]oohr ‘I drive’)