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In phonology, tenseness or tensing is the pronunciation of a vowel with a relatively longer duration and with the tongue positioned slightly higher and less centralized in the mouth compared with another vowel, thus causing a phonemic contrast between the two vowels. Contrast between vowels on the basis of tenseness is common in many languages, including English; for example, in most English dialects, (as in the word ''beet'') is the tense counterpart to the lax (as in ''bit''), and (as in ''kook'') is the tense counterpart to the lax (as in ''cook''). The opposite quality of tenseness, in which a vowel is produced as relatively more shortened, lowered, and centralized, is called laxness or laxing. Unlike most distinctive features, the feature () can be interpreted only relatively, often with a perception of greater tension or pressure in the mouth, which, in a language like English, contrasts between two corresponding vowel types: a tense vowel and a lax vowel. An example in Vietnamese is the letters ''ă'' and ''â'' representing lax vowels, and the letters ''a'' and ''ơ'' representing the corresponding tense vowels. Some languages like Spanish are often considered as having only tense vowels, but since the quality of tenseness is not a phonemic feature in this language, it cannot be applied to describe its vowels in any meaningful way. The term has also occasionally been used to describe contrasts in consonants. ==Vowels== In general, tense vowels are more close (and correspondingly have lower first formants) than their lax counterparts. Tense vowels are sometimes claimed to be articulated with a more advanced tongue root than lax vowels, but this varies, and in some languages it is the lax vowels that are more advanced, or a single language may be inconsistent between front and back or high and mid vowels (Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996, 302–4). The traditional definition, that tense vowels are produced with more "muscular tension" than lax vowels, has not been confirmed by phonetic experiments. Another hypothesis is that lax vowels are more centralized than tense vowels. There are also linguists (Lass 1976, 1-39) who believe that there is no phonetic correlation to the tense–lax opposition. 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. In Germanic languages, lax vowels generally occur only in closed syllables and so are also called checked vowels, whereas the tense vowels are called free vowels as they can occur even at the end of a syllable. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Tenseness」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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