Four short investigations of short duration.

I will present four interconnected investigations regarding the effects of short duration in the context of phonetics, phonology and sound change. I’ll start with the observation that durational shortening appears to be a crucial causal factor in at least three unrelated languages (Ennever, Meakins, and Round 2017; Katz and Pitzanti 2019; Cohen Priva and Gleason 2020). I will argue that this causal route saves us from seemingly counter-optimization in information-driven consonant lenition (e.g. Cohen Priva 2017). Turning our attention to vowels, I will demonstrate that contrast-elimination pressures on vowels would not result in a schwa, but rather in a high central vowel, and that the abundance of schwa vowels cross-linguistically would seem to follow from the loss of a perceived target alongside the maintenance of the need for a vowel (Cohen Priva and Strand 2023). Finally, I will delve into individual differences in the degree to which speakers yield to phonetic pressures, which turns out to be good for explaining the absence of unwarranted sound change (Cohen Priva and Gafter 2024).