Tswana locatives and their status in the inversion construction

Several articles published in the last decade have demonstrated that, in several Sotho-Tswana (S30) and Nguni (S40) languages, locative marking has ceased to be integrated into the noun class system, and preverbal locatives in inversion constructions do not show evidence of being grammatical subjects. Part of the literature on Tswana suggests however that in both respects, Tswana might be different. The present article argues that the locative system of Tswana is in fact not particularly conservative (and is even more innovative than that of the other S30-40 languages), and the preverbal locatives in the inversion construction of Tswana do not show properties that could support analyzing them differently from the preverbal locatives in the other S30-40 languages.