The Autonomy of Tenseness as a Feature

The feature tenseness has long been a controversial issue. Many scholars have hardly accepted tenseness as a distinctive feature, due to the absence of its consistent and objective phonetic evidence especially in English. Instead, they claim that voicing is the primary feature and even say that no other feature can-be independent of voicing. However, voicing feature does not explain everything and significant aerodynamic and physiological correlates of the feature tenseness have been reported in English as well as in some other languages that have the tense/lax distinction in their obstruents. It is suggested that voicing is a simple and direct feature while tenseness is a complex and indirect feature and its autonomy as a distinctive feature should be acknowledged. This will enable us to describe the phonetic reality more properly across languages as well as in individual languages.