The aim of the paper is to present a first attempt at annotating Information Structure roles in syntactic treebanks of the Universal Dependencies collection, discussing theoretical considerations and practical methodological questions while presenting our core annotation principles. We focus on constructions in which Topic or Focus is overtly marked through (morpho)syntactic means. The proposed annotation is illustrated using examples from five languages: Wolof, Japanese, Tundra Nenets, Hungarian, and Italian.

Information status — the newness or givenness of referents in discourse — is known to affect the production of language at many different levels. At the morphosyntactic level, information status gives rise to special words orders, elisions, and other phenomena that challenge the notion that morphosyntax can be considered independent of discourse context. Though there are many language-specific corpora annotated for information status and its related phenomena, coreference and anaphora resolution, what is not available at present is a cross-lingually consistently annotated corpus or annotation scheme that would allow for comparativestudy of these phenomena across many diverse languages. In this paper we present our work to build such a resource. We are annotating a parsed, parallel corpus of prose in many languages for information status and coreference resolution, so that like-for-like cross-lingual comparisons can be made at the intersection of discourse and syntax. Our corpus can and will be used bot