Although treebanks annotated according to the guidelines of Universal Dependencies (UD) now exist for many languages, the goal of annotating the same phenomena in a cross-linguistically consistent fashion is not always met. In this paper, we investigate one phenomenon where we believe such consistency is lacking, namely expletive elements. Such elements occupy a position that is structurally associated with a core argument (or sometimes an oblique dependent), yet are non-referential and semantically void. Many UD treebanks identify at least some elements as expletive, but the range of phenomena differs between treebanks, even for closely related languages, and sometimes even for different treebanks for the same language. In this paper, we present criteria for identifying expletives that are applicable across languages and compatible with the goals of UD, give an overview of expletives as found in current UD treebanks, and present recommendations for the annotation of expletives so that more consistent annotation can be achieved in future releases.

The Norwegian Dependency Treebank is a new syntactic treebank for Norwegian Bokmäl and Nynorsk with manual syntactic and morphological annotation, developed at the National Library of Norway in collaboration with the University of Oslo. It is the first publically available treebank for Norwegian. This paper presents the core principles behind the syntactic annotation and how these principles were employed in certain specific cases. We then present the selection of texts and distribution between genres, as well as the annotation process and an evaluation of the inter-annotator agreement. Finally, we present the first results of data-driven dependency parsing of Norwegian, contrasting four state-of-the-art dependency parsers trained on the treebank. The consistency and the parsability of this treebank is shown to be comparable to other large treebank initiatives.