Focus, obviation, and word order in East Cree

The goal of this paper is to show that the word order of a non-configurational language can be sensitive to the grammatical encoding of (non)topicality or obviation. The new data presented also provide evidence that the left periphery of an East Cree sentence plays a role for information packaging instructions. It is shown that an analysis that assumes that Focus is a functional projection fails to explain the East Cree data. Our analysis rather supports a treatment of Focus as an interpretation rule which is not encoded directly in the syntax.