East Cree Ghost Participants

The Cree verbal morphology includes a relational paradigm, characterized by a morpheme -w- on the verb. When verbs occur in this form, the presence in the discourse of an extra third person participant is entailed. We will argue that -w- introduces an argument which is realized as a pronominal object in the f-structure. We further argue that what has traditionally been called an obviative morpheme (-im-) is in fact an alternative realization of relational morphology.