an annotation scheme for free word order languages we describe an annotation scheme and a tool developed for creating linguistically annotated corpora for non-configurational languages. since the requirements for such a formalism differ from those posited for configurational languages, several features have been added, influencing the architecture of the scheme. the resulting scheme reflects a stratificational notion of language, and makes only minimal assumptions about the interrelation of the particular representational strata. we release the negra corpus, a hand parsed corpus of german newspaper text containing approximately 20,000 sentences.