Tenseness is a term used in phonology to describe a particular vowel quality that is phonemically contrastive in many languages, including English. It has also occasionally been used to describe contrasts in consonants. Unlike most distinctive features , the feature [tense] can be interpreted only relatively, that is, in a language like English that contrasts (e.g. beat) and [ɪ] (e.g. bit), it is possible to say that the former is a tense vowel while the latter is a lax vowel. But in a language like Spanish, where there is no contrast, the vowel [i] cannot be meaningfully described as either tense or lax.

Comparison between tense and lax vowels

In general, tense vowels are more close (and corresondingly have lower first formants) than their lax counterparts. Tense vowels may also be articulated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels. The traditional comparison, that tense vowels are produced with more "muscular tension" than lax vowels, has not been confirmed by phonetic experiments. Another theory is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels. There are also linguists who believe that there is no phonetic correlate to the opposition of tense and lax.

In many Germanic languages, such as RP English, standard German, and Dutch, tense vowels are longer in duration than lax vowels; but in other languages, such as Scots, Scottish English, and Icelandic, there is no such correlation.

Since in Germanic languages, lax vowels generally only occur in closed syllables, they are also called checked vowels , whereas the tense vowels are called free vowels as they can occur at the end of a syllable.

Tenseness in consonants

Occasionally, tenseness has been used to distinguish pairs of contrasting consonants in languages. Korean, for example, has a three-way contrast among stops; the three series are often transcribed as [p t c k] - [p^h t^h c^h k^h] - [pʼ tʼ cʼ kʼ]. The contrast between the [p] series and the [pʼ] series is sometimes said to be a function of tenseness: the former are lax and the latter tense. In this case the definition of "tense" would have to include greater glottal tension.

In some dialects of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, contrasts are found between [l, l^j, n, n^j] on the one hand and [ɫˑ, ʎˑ, nˠˑ, ɲˑ] on the other hand. Here again the former set have sometimes been described as lax and the latter set as tense. It is not clear what phonetic characteristics other than greater duration would be associated with tenseness in this case.

Some researchers have argued that the contrast in German traditionally described as voicing ([p t k] vs. [b d g]) is in fact better analyzed as tenseness, since the latter set is voiceless in Southern German. German linguistics call the distinction rather fortis and lenis than tense and lax. Tenseness is especially used to explain stop consonants of the High German Alemannic dialects because they have two series of them that are identically voiceless and unaspirated. However, it is debated whether the distinction is really a result of different muscular tension, and not of gemination.

Bibliography

• Giegerich, Heinz J. English Phonology: An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Jessen, Michael. "Phonetics and Phonology of Tense and Lax Obstruents in German." Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998.
• Kim, Nam-Kil. "Korean." In The World's Major Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie, 881-98. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
• Ladefoged, Peter, and Ian Maddieson. The Sounds of the World's Languages. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.
• Ó Siadhail, Michael. Modern Irish: Grammatical Structure and Dialectal Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

See also

• List of phonetic topics