Otense & Lax Vowels in American English

The traditional notion of vowel tension

Tense refers to the overall muscular effort used in producing a sound. A tense or fortis sound is produced with a relatively strong muscular effort; it involves a greater movement of the upper vocal tract away from the position of rest, and a relatively strong speed of acoustic energy (e.g. high front and high back vowels). Conversely, a lax or lenis sound is produced with less muscular effort and movement, and is relatively short and indistinct (e.g. centralized vowels).

Tense and lax vowel sets exhibit phonetic differences which are likely to depend on the different kinds of syllables in which they occur--for example, closed syllables (which have a consonant at the end) and open syllables (which do not have a consonant at the end). Nevertheless, there are a number of situations where English deviates from this mechanism. For example, the ing sound, as in sing, has a quality in-between that of [i] and [I]; and that which occurs in here in most forms of American English is also intermediate [i] and [I] (Ladefoged, 1993, p. 269).

Even though historically quantity equated with tension, tense and lax are now more likely to be viewed as qualitative aspects of vowel quantity, and as terms in phonetics and poetics referring to the length of a vowel--long or short (terms which some phonologists still distinguish from tense and lax). The measurable duration of vowels depends also on at leas

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need rethinking: long/short, tense/lax, high/low indeed become objects of often subjective and approximate evaluations. Kenyon and Knott (1953) remarked that "In few cases of American English as a whole is time length, or duration, of vowels significant--that is, used to distinguish from each other words otherwise alike" (p. xxvi)--reason for which they did not indicate the length of English vowels in their authoritative dictionary of pronunciation of American English. Francis (1958) noted that length is seldom a distinctive feature in American English: "It varies with the environment of the sound and often with the general rhythm or tone of the sentence" (p. 97). Also, all back vowels are round and all front and central vowels are unround in most standard American English dialects. As importantly, "no vowels differ only in degree of tension; they differ in position as well. It is, thus, often not necessary to specify 'tense' or 'lax', since the position automatically determines this distinction" (Francis, 1958, p. 97). Chomsky and Halle (1991) deal with the central problem in the noncyclic phonology of English, that is, the problem of accounting for the intricate system of vowel alternations that are found primarily, but not so
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