Relative clauses and subject inversion in Chokwe, Kaonde, Lunda and Luvale

Subject inversion in Bantu non-subject relative clauses has been attributed to the form and the prosodic status of the relative markers. The canonical subject-verbobject word order (SVO) is maintained in languages with ''independent words'' as relative markers, and verb-subject inversion takes place in languages where the relative markers are prefixes attached onto the verb (Giv6n 1972, Meeussen 1978, Demuth & Harford 1999, Harford & Demuth 1999). While Kaonde and Lunda appear to support empirically this analysis, it cannot extend to other Bantu languages like Chokwe and Luvale. In the latter languages, subject inversion is obligatorily in non-subject relative clauses even though they are marked by independent words.