Nasal demorification and proper licensing in Cilungu

In Cilungu, a vowel is typically long in pre-NC contexts. Bickmore (2006) posits that the vowel before an NC cluster is lexically short, but undergoes compensatory lengthening in the following way: the moraic nasal in an NC cluster undergoes demorification, which then triggers lengthening of the preceding vowel.

In contrast, this paper proposes that a pre-NC vowel is lexically long and that the nasal in the apparent NC sequence is syllabified into an onset followed by a silent vowel. Furthermore, I posit that the supposed compensatory lengthening stems from proper licensing (Kaye 1995, Harris 1994), which prevents a short vowel from appearing before an NC cluster in Cilungu. This provides a unified analysis to this and other seemingly unrelated phenomena.