What kinds of trees grow in Swedish soil?

One of the issues brought up in this workshop concerns the relationship between the syntactic properties of a given language and the choice of linguistic theory for annotation purposes. Our Swedish treebank consortium, consisting of researchers from Växjö University, KTH and Stockholm University, is currently facing a specific instance of this issue in trying to define an annotation standard for a large-scale treebank of Swedish written and spoken language. In this paper, I will discuss and compare four different annotation schemes that have been proposed for Swedish in terms of their suitability for Swedish syntax as well as their relationship to linguistic theory and annotation schemes proposed for other languages. Other aspects that will be touched upon are the availability of parsers and/or annotated training data for developing parsers, the different requirements for annotation of spoken and written language, and the different needs of different user groups. By way of background, I will start by reviewing some basic facts about the syntax of Swedish, a Germanic verb second language with moderately fixed word order. In doing this I will also introduce the Scandinavian tradition of descriptive grammar, in particular the influential field model due to Diderichsen [5]. The background section also contains a brief discussion of existing annotation schemes for other languages and their relation to current linguistic theory. The main part of the paper will be devoted to a discussion and comparison of the following four annotation schemes for Swedish: