Grammatical encoding of topic in Bantu

Research on non-canonical syntactic constructions across Bantu languages has established some significant findings in the last decades, regarding (i) the presence/absence of inversion (where the logical subject is positioned post-verbally), (ii) the kinds of grammatical/discourse element that can be in the highest syntactic (=preverbal) position, and (iii) the patterns of agreement. Based on data from 30 Bantu languages, the present work attempts to bring together these previous findings from the perspective of the micro-variation in the encoding of topic.