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.