The article foregrounds some basic explanations about syntactic corpus annotation and the methodology of building treebanks. It draws attention to the linguistic theoretical models on the basis of which the majority of treebank annotation approaches are formed, and to the applicability of syntactic corpus annotation for the studies of descriptive and theoretical linguistics, and for natural language processing. In addition the article presents the results of three studies connected with multi-lingual inductive dependency parsing on the first treebank for the Slovene language, the Slovene Dependency Treebank.