Penultimate lengthening and stress in Kinande

Words in isolation in Kinande, a narrow Bantu language of eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo), usually surface with a long vowel at the penultimate position. Verbal forms that do not exhibit this penultimate length can be shown to contain a phantom consonant which is part of the formative –aC- and that derives from the pre-final formative –ag- in Proto-Bantu. It is argued in this paper that penultimate lengthening in Kinande is a manifestation of a metrical representation of stress and that its phonetic realization is due to a rule that turns a penultimate light syllable into a heavy one at the end of an intonation phrasal domain.