This document outlines provisional guidelines for the syntactic annotation of corpora. It consists of five main sections. This section (Section 2) defines the scope of the report: it defines a number of terms , discusses some problems and issues , goes into the distinction between the content of syntactic annotation and the method of representation , and gives a brief overview of existing annotation schemes . In section 3 a set of annotation levels is outlined and discussed. Section 4 proposes and defines an annotation scheme that can be used to annotate corpora. Section 5 mentions particular problems that may be encountered in the application of any scheme, and section 6 proposes guidelines for the documentation of annotated corpora. In appendix the annotation scheme developed in section 4 is illustrated by applying it to small text samples from different languages.