  We study the effects of non-trivial initial quantum states for inflationary
fluctuations within the context of the effective field theory for inflation
constructed by Cheung et al. which allows us to discriminate between different
initial states in a model-independent way. We develop a Green's function/path
integral based formulation that incorporates initial state effects and use it
to address questions such as how state-dependent is the consistency relation
for the bispectrum, how many e-folds beyond the minimum required to solve the
cosmological fine tunings of the big bang are we allowed so that some
information from the initial state survives until late times, among others. We
find that the so-called consistency condition relating the local limit of the
bispectrum and the slow-roll parameter is a state-dependent statement that can
be avoided for physically consistent initial states either with or without
initial non-Gaussianities.
