Abstract Treebanks (parsed corpora) play an important role in linguistic research, but creating high-quality parses can be very labor-intensive. This paper discusses the prospects of creating such parses in the context of New Englishes and what kinds of research insights parses can deliver. We present Singapore English as a case study. We suggest that despite the many contact-derived lexical and grammatical properties of Singapore English, it is quite feasible to apply an off-the-shelf American English parser to generate parses of Singapore English. In addition, we present an exploratory analysis of noun phrases in a Singapore English treebank, to illustrate the potential of parses and treebanks in research on World Englishes.