The present study investigates the instability of adjacent liquids in a variety of Southern Bavarian German. The focus is a synchronic process converting /r/ to [d] before or after /l/—a process argued to involve a dissimilation of the phonological feature [liquid], which itself is triggered by a specific OCP constraint, *[liquid][liquid]. In addition to providing evidence for the feature [liquid], the present article also supports a model of segment structure in which the traditional feature [sonorant] is replaced with the privative node [Sonorant Voice] (SV). The Bavarian dialect also displays a number of OCP-motivated constraints that ban other sequences of identical manner features, namely, [continuant], [nasal], [strident].*

The German derivational suffix -in primarily marks female sex on nouns that denote people. This paper investigates the attachment of the suffix to masculine noun bases that refer back to feminine nouns denoting inanimate referents in the same construction, seemingly as a means of making the gender of the two nouns match. The same phenomenon is also observed in Dutch despite the absence of a masculine/feminine distinction in the standard language. It is argued that the gender matching observed is a form of agreement. Using the evidence of corpus data and other attestations, it is concluded here that, because the inanimate referents of the subject nouns in the constructions involved all appear close to animate referents on animacy hierarchies (that is, they fall just outside the suffix's usual sphere of use), the gender agreement performed by -in (and its Dutch counterparts) is an extension of the suffix's prototypical derivational role, but resembles inflection in some respects and may indicate that the suffix is undergoing grammaticalization.*