An account of vowel lengthening in Cilubà

Abstract

This article offers an autosegmental explanation of vowel lengthening processes in Cilubà, one of the major Bantu languages of Zaire. It uses X elements of the skeletal tier as timing units equivalent to the single beat duration of a short vowel. I attempt in this article to relate the phonological length of segments to their phonetic duration by assuming that segmental material linked to two X slots is realized with greater duration than that linked to one X slot. The analysis can be extended to several Bantu languages though the article focusses on Cilubà and distinguishes underlying long vowels from surface long vowels and affirms that on the surface some long vowels result either from successive short vowel merging (by Obligatory Contour Principle) or from several compensatory mechanisms by which underlying short vowels take over timing units left vacant for one reason or another.