Universal Dependencies

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe
The Ohio State University
Department of Linguistics
demarneffe.1@osu.edu

Christopher D. Manning
Stanford University
Department of Linguistics
manning@cs.stanford.edu

Joakim Nivre
Uppsala University
Department of Linguistics and Philology
joakim.nivre@lingfil.uu.se

Daniel Zeman
Charles University
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
zeman@ufal.mff.cuni.cz

Universal dependencies (UD) is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation of human lan-
guage, which to date has been used to create treebanks for more than 100 languages. In this
article, we outline the linguistic theory of the UD framework, which draws on a long tradition of
typologically oriented grammatical theories. Grammatical relations between words are centrally
used to explain how predicate–argument structures are encoded morphosyntactically in different
languages while morphological features and part-of-speech classes give the properties of words.
We argue that this theory is a good basis for crosslinguistically consistent annotation of typolog-
ically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding
as well as broader linguistic studies.

1. Introduction

Universal dependencies (UD) is at the same time a framework for crosslinguistically
consistent morphosyntactic annotation, an open community effort to create morphosyn-
tactically annotated corpora for many languages, and a steadily growing collection of
such corpora. In all these respects, UD has undeniably been very successful, growing
in only six years from ten treebanks and a dozen researchers to 183 treebanks for 104

Submission received: 2 July 2020; revised version received: 9 February 2021; accepted for publication:
25 February 2021.

https://doi.org/10.1162/COLI_a_00402

© 2021 Association for Computational Linguistics
Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license

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languages with contributions from 416 researchers around the world.1 UD treebanks are
now widely used in natural language processing research, including but not limited to
research on syntactic and semantic parsing, and increasingly also in linguistic research,
particularly on psycholinguistics and word order typology.

Some people think that UD is only a tool for annotation, and as such a rather eclectic
approach building on existing de facto standards with many practical compromises. Al-
though UD borrows terminology and concepts from many earlier grammatical theories,
it is nevertheless a coherent theory resulting from a large amount of careful community
work aiming at a principled but broadly applicable view of morphology and syntax.
We believe that a clearer description of the underlying theory will help people to fully
understand UD, its merits, and its limitations, and we attempt to articulate that theory,
in particular, for version 2 of UD, in this article.2

The article is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the basic theoretical as-
sumptions of UD, including a commitment to words and grammatical relations as
fundamental building blocks of grammatical structure. Section 3 is a survey of linguistic
constructions and their analysis in UD, with examples from a broad range of languages.
In Section 4, we zoom in on core arguments, which play a central role in UD, and discuss
how they can be analyzed across typologically different languages. Section 5 discusses
the design principles of UD against the backdrop of previous sections and Section 6
concludes with a brief outlook.

2. Basic Tenets of UD

The goal of UD is to offer a linguistic representation that is useful for morphosyntactic
research, semantic interpretation, and for practical natural language processing across
different human languages. It therefore puts an emphasis on simple surface represen-
tations that allow parallelism between similar constructions across different languages,
despite differences of word order, morphology, and the presence or absence of function
words.

2.1 Linguistic Representation and Information Packaging

When humans observe the world, they see entities (or objects) that participate in events
(actions and states). The organization of all human languages reﬂects this basic world
view. Therefore, in UD, we organize description around the two fundamental linguistic
units of a nominal, canonically used for representing an entity, and a clause, canonically
used for representing an event. Both nominals and clauses are often reﬁned by describ-
ing an attribute of the entity or event, which can be done by the third fundamental
linguistic unit of a modiﬁer.

2.1.1 Heads and Dependents. A clause has a main predicate that expresses the state or
action, and in most cases, states and actions involve participants expressed as nominals.
In such a way, language has a hierarchical structure: Clauses can contain nominals, mod-
iﬁers, and other clauses; nominals can also contain all three phrasal units; and modiﬁers

1 Release v2.7, November 15, 2020. For more information, see https://universaldependencies.org.
2 Because our focus in this article is theoretical, we do not go into practical matters concerning annotation,
treebanks, and parsing. We also do not discuss the historical development of UD. For these aspects we
refer to the papers on UD v1 (Nivre et al. 2016) and v2 (Nivre et al. 2020) and to the UD Web site
(https://universaldependencies.org).

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nsubj

obj

advmod

obl

the army

completely

destroyed

the city

in a day

the army ’s

complete

destruction

the city

in a day

amod

nmod:poss

nmod

Figure 1
Partial UD analysis for a clause (top) and a nominal (bottom).

can contain modiﬁers. To express these ideas in UD, we adopt a dependency grammar
perspective: A phrase has a head and other things that it contains are dependents of
that head.

Dependency is a binary asymmetrical relation, which we represent in diagrams by
an arrow from the head to the dependent (or, more precisely, to the head word of the
dependent, when the dependent is itself a multiword unit), as in Figure 1. Through
these dependencies, the words of a sentence are organized into a tree structure with the
main predicate as the root.3 Dependencies are typed with grammatical relation labels,
as further discussed in Section 2.3. The head in a dependency is informally the main
word of a phrase. The head of a nominal is canonically a noun. The head of a clause,
commonly referred to as the predicate, is most commonly a verb but may also be an
adjective or adverb, or even a nominal. The most common modiﬁer heads are adjectives
and adverbs. Sometimes linguistic head functions are divided between a structural
center (an auxiliary or function word) and a semantic center (a lexical or content word),
such as for periphrastic verb tenses like has arrived. This is what Tesnière (2015 [1959],
ch. 23) refers to as a dissociated nucleus. In such cases, UD chooses the lexical or content
word as the head, and makes function words dependents of the head in the dependency
tree structure, while recognizing that they do form a nucleus together with the content
word. A consequence of this decision, further discussed in Section 2.3.3, is that a UD
tree represents a sentence’s observed surface predicate–argument structure rather than
necessarily accurately capturing phrase-internal syntactic constituency.

2.1.2 Nominals, Clauses, and Modiﬁers. In more detail, UD assumes a simple typology of
three kinds of phrasal units (which might minimally be just a single word):

1. Nominals: the primary means for referring to entities

2. Clauses: the primary means for referring to events

3. Modiﬁers: the canonical attributive modiﬁers of nominals, clauses, and

other modiﬁers

3 The tree constraint holds for the basic UD representation, which is the focus of this article. UD also

deﬁnes an enhanced representation, which makes explicit additional implicit relations between words
(such as propagating relations between conjuncts and adding subject relations for control and raising
constructions). For more information about the enhanced representation, which is a rooted directed
graph, see Nivre et al. (2020).

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Nominals are similar to the notion of a noun phrase or determiner phrase in many
theories, but encompass the entire nominal extended projection (Grimshaw 1991 [2005]),
also covering prepositional phrases. While the basic use of nominals is always to refer
to entities, they may be used in other functions. For example, most languages allow
the nominalization of an event: The continuation of hostilities describes an event, but
has the syntactic form of a nominal. Clauses can be either the root sentence or an
embedded clause, typically express events and states, and have a main predicate, which
is canonically a verb but can be other parts of speech used predicatively.

Both nominals and clauses can have their meaning added to by the presence of
modifying phrases. Sometimes these phrases are themselves nominals or clauses. For
example, in Example (1a), there is a nominal modifying a clause; in Example (1c), there
is a nominal modifying a larger nominal; and in Example (1d), there is a clause mod-
ifying a nominal. However, sometimes modifying phrases are single words or smaller
modifying phrases that do not expand into the same rich structures as nominals and
clauses. We describe this third class of linguistic units as modiﬁers. In Example (1b),
there is a modiﬁer modifying a clause, and in Example (1e), there is a modiﬁer modify-
ing a nominal. Modiﬁers can themselves be modiﬁed: The modiﬁer somewhat modiﬁes
rusty in Example (1e). It is generally true in languages that there is not an inﬁnite regress:
The modiﬁers of modiﬁers are limited and normally of the form of basic modiﬁers, and
so we continue to call them all modiﬁers.

(1)

a. [He opened the can [with a screwdriver]]

b. [He opened the can [carefully]]

c. [the screwdriver [on the table]]

d. [the screwdriver [which my mother bought me]]

e. [the [[somewhat] rusty] screwdriver]

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This taxonomy is not unique to UD. As it reﬂects the basic structure of human language,
similar taxonomies can be found in many other frameworks, especially those starting
from a functional or typological perspective on language. For example, Croft (1991,
forthcoming) distinguishes reference, predication, and modiﬁcation as three basic
information packaging functions, or propositional act functions, underlying syntactic
constructions. These correspond straightforwardly to the canonical usages of our nom-
inals, clauses, and modiﬁers, respectively.

The distinction between nominals and clauses is fundamental to UD, which system-
atically uses different dependency relations in the two types of structures, as illustrated
in Figure 1. The clause the army completely destroyed the city in a day is headed by the
verbal predicate destroyed, while the nominal the army’s complete destruction of the city in
a day is headed by the noun destruction. The predicate has two core arguments (the army,
the city), while the noun has two genitive modiﬁers accompanied by different kinds of
case markers (the army’s, of the city). The adverbial modiﬁer (advmod, completely) of the
predicate corresponds to an adjectival modiﬁer (amod, complete) of the noun. Even the
temporal modiﬁer in a day, which has the form of a prepositional phrase in both cases, is
classiﬁed as an oblique modiﬁer (obl) of the predicate but as a nominal modiﬁer (nmod)
of the noun. Similarly, the typology of dependency relations also captures whether the
dependent is a nominal, a clause, or a modiﬁer. For example, a modiﬁer of a nominal
will be respectively a nominal modiﬁer (nmod), an adjectival modiﬁer (amod), or an
adnominal clause (acl) depending on the type of the dependent. Hence phrasal types
are recoverable without being explicitly represented.

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Universal Dependencies

nsubj

obj

obl

English: the dog

Finnish:

koira
Case=Nom

chased

jahtasi

the cat

from the room

kissan
Case=Acc

huoneesta
Case=Ela

nsubj

obj

obl

Figure 2
Simpliﬁed UD annotation for equivalent sentences from English (top) and Finnish (bottom).

2.2 Words as Basic Units

UD follows traditional grammar in giving primary status to words. Words are the basic
elements connected by dependency relations; they have morphological properties and
enter into syntactic relations. The primacy of words can be understood as a commitment
to the lexical integrity principle (Chomsky 1970; Bresnan and Mchombo 1995; Aronoff
2007), which states that words are built out of different structural elements and by
different principles of composition than syntactic constructions. Despite the challenges
in deﬁning words in a crosslinguistically consistent manner—faced with phenomena
like clitics, compounding, and incorporation, to mention only a few4—we believe that
this approach is more interpretable and useful for most potential users of UD and
generalizes better across languages than trying to segment words into smaller units like
morphemes. This view is further supported by developments in morphological theory,
which favor word-based abstractive models over morpheme-based constructive models
(Stump 2001; Blevins 2006; Blevins, Ackerman, and Malouf 2017).

It is important to note, however, that the morphosyntactic notion of word does not
always coincide with orthographical or phonological units. For instance, clitics (Spencer
and Luís 2012) often need to be separated from their hosts and treated as independent
words even if they are not recognized as such in conventional orthography (for instance,
the English ’s genitive, as in the army’s in Figure 1, acts as a phrasal clitic, as can be
seen by expansions such as the army of the undead’s). Similarly, compound words need a
special treatment, because in some languages their written form may contain boundary
markers such as whitespace (as in night school in English) whereas in other languages
they do not (as in Abendschule ‘night school’ in German).

2.2.1 Content Words, Function Words, and Grammaticalization. We expect the words that
enter into the main syntactic relations to be autosemantic, that is, content words with an
independent meaning—typically verbs, nouns, adjectives, or adverbs, as well as corre-
sponding pro-forms with a contextually determined referential meaning. For instance,
the backbone of the UD morphosyntactic representations for the English and Finnish
sentences in Figure 2 consists of the three relations that are common to these sentences:
argument and modiﬁer relations involving predicates and nominals.

These content words often occur together with grammatical markers, synsemantic
elements that further specify their meaning or syntactic role. Typical examples are

4 See also Haspelmath (2011a).

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markers of tense, mood, and aspect for (verbal) predicates and of number, deﬁniteness,
and case for nominals. As explained in Section 2.1.1, UD attaches such elements as
dependents of the content word, analyzing them as parts of dissociated nuclei.

The distinctions between content words and function words, and between function
words, clitics, and inﬂectional morphemes, are not always clear-cut. We know from
the literature on grammaticalization that grammatical markers normally develop out
of content words and ﬁrst appear as separate function words but often later become
clitics and eventually inﬂectional afﬁxes, a process sometimes referred to as the cline
of grammaticalization (Hopper and Traugott 2003). At any given historical stage, a
language will contain constructions that are at intermediate stages of this development,
and where it is therefore not straightforward to classify the components of the construc-
tion. Consider, for example, the Swedish sentences in Example (2).

(2)

a. Hon kunde (*att) sjunga

she could to
‘She could sing’

sing

b. Hon började (att) sjunga

she began to
‘She began to sing’

sing

c. Hon gillade *(att) sjunga

she liked to
‘She liked to sing’

sing

In Example (2a), it is impossible to insert the inﬁnitive marker att before the verb sjunga
‘sing’, which shows that kunde ‘could’ is an auxiliary verb. In Example (2c), it is equally
impossible to omit the inﬁnitive marker, which shows that gillade ‘liked’ is a main verb
taking an inﬁnitive complement. In Example (2b), however, the inﬁnitive marker is
optional, which makes the status of började ‘began’ unclear, all the more as its meaning
is mainly aspectual and of a kind that could undergo grammaticalization. In annotation,
we are forced to make a somewhat arbitrary choice and make Example (2b) parallel to
either Example (2a) or Example (2c)—but not both. Note that in Example (2a), the verb
sjunga is the head of the sentence, while in Example (2c), gillade is the head, so changing
the analysis of Example (2b), as grammaticalization proceeds, requires not just a part-of-
speech change but a fundamental syntactic reanalysis of the sentence, or what Gerdes
and Kahane (2016) refer to as a “catastrophe.” Making particular categorical decisions in
such intermediate cases will inevitably add some distortion to our representation of the
linguistic reality, but we can only do our best to maintain consistency in these decisions
and carefully document the criteria.

Similar issues arise in word segmentation, where it is sometimes difﬁcult to decide
whether a grammatical marker should be treated as an inﬂectional afﬁx, clitic, or func-
tion word, despite extensive discussion of discriminative criteria, such as in Zwicky and
Pullum (1983).

2.2.2 Part-of-Speech Categories. All linguistic theories assume that words can be classiﬁed
by a word class or part of speech (POS) according to their behavior within the lan-
guage system. Partly for broad comprehensibility, UD stays fairly close to traditional
parts of speech, such as the eight parts of speech commonly recognized for English,
but it makes a few ﬁner distinctions, better reﬂecting modern linguistic typology, and
adds some classes for punctuation and other symbols. As a result, UD distinguishes
17 coarse-grained classes of words and other elements of text, and assigns them the

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Table 1
Universal part-of-speech tags (UPOS). Typos and abbreviations are given the category of the
unabbreviated or correct word.

Traditional POS UPOS

Category

noun

verb

adjective

adverb
pronoun
preposition
conjunction

interjection
–
–
–
–

noun
propn
verb
aux
adj
det
num
adv
pron
adp
cconj
sconj
intj
part
x
sym
punct

common noun
proper noun
main verb
auxiliary verb or other tense, aspect, or mood particle
adjective
determiner (including article)
numeral (cardinal)
adverb
pronoun
adposition (preposition/postposition)
coordinating conjunction
subordinating conjunction
interjection
particle (special single word markers in some languages)
other (e.g., words in foreign language expressions)
non-punctuation symbol (e.g., a hash (#) or emoji)
punctuation

labels (“universal part-of-speech tags,” UPOS) shown in Table 1. These categories are
widely attested in the world’s languages. We do not claim that all languages must
use all of these categories, but we do assume that every word in every language can
be assigned one of them. Some word-class distinctions are particularly important in
UD: For example, the dividing line between nouns and verbs plays a signiﬁcant role in
specifying whether a constituent is nominal or clausal (Section 2.1.2).

It is not easy in all cases to deﬁne word classes in a crosslinguistically consistent
manner. Grammatical criteria used in word classiﬁcation have to be speciﬁc for indi-
vidual languages, although we do expect similar criteria in languages that are closely
related. Because morphological criteria are not sufﬁcient and available for all categories
in all languages, in many cases we have to rely primarily on syntactic criteria. For
instance, Czech adjectives inﬂect for three grammatical genders, two numbers, seven
cases, and three degrees of comparison. They typically specify properties of nouns and
are found right before the nouns they modify. In contrast, only a subset of English
adjectives can inﬂect for degree of comparison, and none inﬂect for gender, number,
or case. Yet their prototypical function and distribution is similar to Czech: If used
attributively, they occur right before the nouns whose attributes they specify.

While the deﬁnition of word categories is not universal, their names are portable
across languages so that same-labeled categories show partially similar syntactic behav-
ior and overlapping semantic content (Schachter and Shopen 2007; Haspelmath 2001;
Croft 1991). It is possible to have one category that will contain most words referring
to entities, such as mother, dog, or house; words in this category will be called nouns.
Similarly, the label “verb” is used for the class of prototypical action words (such as
go, buy, eat), and the class of adjectives will likely contain equivalents of small, good, or
white. In addition, each of these categories may contain words with less prototypical se-
mantics, if they follow the language-particular rules that deﬁne the category. Hence the
English nouns include words like destruction and weakness because their morphological
and distributional behavior is noun-like, although their meaning is derived from the
verb destroy and the adjective weak, respectively.

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A common difﬁculty is that words of one category are sometimes used in positions
and functions normally associated with a different category, without changing their
morphology (if morphological criteria are available at all). For example, an English
adjective may appear in the subject position with a deﬁnite article but without the
modiﬁed noun (the healthy, the sick). We could treat such examples as instances of ellipsis
(where the underlying noun phrase could be the healthy/sick people) or we could say that
the adjective has been converted into a noun in the given sentence. However, the part-of-
speech classiﬁcation is most useful if it captures regular, prevailing syntactic behavior
and does not reﬂect sentence-speciﬁc exceptional behavior. If the POS category were
completely predictable from the syntactic function (which is an independent part of
UD annotation), then the POS tag would be uninformative. It would also be harder to
ﬁnd interesting crosslinguistic differences, for example, that language X allows words
of category a to have syntactic function b, but language Y does not. Therefore in English
we assign the adj tag to healthy even if it heads a nominal phrase.

Sometimes a functional shift is better explained by grammaticalization (see
Section 2.2.1) rather than by exceptional usage in a speciﬁc sentence. The English adverb
so is used as an adverb in Example (3a) and Example (3b), but as a discourse connective
similar to a coordinating conjunction in Example (3c). However, we keep the word so in
the adverb category in these three examples.

(3)

a. People work so hard

b. If you have not done so already

c. We are aiming to have it next week, so I need to know if you can ship it

quickly

Nevertheless, there are situations where we consider the two competing functions
too distant and mutually incompatible, and we treat the word as a homonym whose
category has to be disambiguated by context. Consider the Spanish examples in Exam-
ple (4).

(4)

a. los siete candidatos que compiten mañana

the seven candidates that compete tomorrow
‘the seven candidates that will compete tomorrow’

b. Descubrimos

que los tres

discovered.1PL that the three kings were
‘We discovered that the three kings were here’

reyes estaban aquí
here

In Example (4a), the word que ‘that’ is a relative pronoun that represents the sub-
ject of the subordinate clause; we tag it pron. On the other hand, the same word in
Example (4b) has no argument role in the subordinate clause; it is merely a marker
of subordination. We tag it sconj. The same holds for the English word that in the
corresponding English sentences. Sometimes morphology in a paradigm makes the
analysis clear: When English nouns are used as verbs like in You should butter your bread,
we regard the word as a verb because it participates in a paradigm with usual verb
morphology in the past tense or with third singular subject agreement.

2.2.3 Morphological Features. Many classes of words in many languages participate in
paradigms of forms that express extra features, such as number or tense. We can further
divide the appropriate POS classes into subclasses according to features that express

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Table 2
Universal morphological features.

pronominal type
numeral type
possessive
reﬂexive
foreign word
abbreviation
wrong spelling

Feature

PronType
NumType
Poss
Reﬂex
Foreign
Abbr
Typo

Values

Art Dem Emp Exc Ind Int Neg Prs Rcp Rel Tot
Card Dist Frac Mult Ord Range Sets
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes
Yes

gender
animacy
noun class
number
case

deﬁniteness
comparison

verbal form
mood
tense
aspect
voice
evidentiality
polarity
person
politeness
clusivity

Com Fem Masc Neut
Anim Hum Inan Nhum

Gender
Animacy
NounClass Bantu1-23 Wol1-12 . . .
Number
Case

Coll Count Dual Grpa Grpl Inv Pauc Plur Ptan Sing Tri
Abs Acc Erg Nom
Abe Ben Cau Cmp Cns Com Dat Dis Equ Gen Ins Par Tem Tra Voc
Abl Add Ade All Del Ela Ess Ill Ine Lat Loc Per Sub Sup Ter
Com Cons Def Ind Spec
Abs Cmp Equ Pos Sup

Deﬁnite
Degree

VerbForm
Mood
Tense
Aspect
Voice
Evident
Polarity
Person
Polite
Clusivity

Conv Fin Gdv Ger Inf Part Sup Vnoun
Adm Cnd Des Imp Ind Irr Jus Nec Opt Pot Prp Qot Sub
Fut Imp Nfut Past Pqp Pres
Hab Imp Iter Perf Prog Prosp
Act Antip Bfoc Cau Dir Inv Lfoc Mid Pass Rcp
Fh Nfh
Neg Pos
0 1 2 3 4
Elev Form Humb Infm
In Ex

paradigmatic position. For example, the VerbForm feature distinguishes the ﬁnite verb
from various nonﬁnite forms, which often show a mix of verbal properties and prop-
erties of other classes (nouns, adjectives, or adverbs). Depending on the language, it is
then possible to distinguish between a ﬁnite verb (verb VerbForm=Fin), a verbal participle
(verb VerbForm=Part), a deverbal participial adjective (adj VerbForm=Part), and a common
adjective (adj). It seems quite possible to deﬁne a universal set of features, covering
what is described by morphology in the world’s languages, and our system in UD is in
line with other attempts to do this, such as UniMorph (Sylak-Glassman et al. 2015) and
the GOLD Ontology (Farrar and Langendoen 2003).

UD deﬁnes a set of feature-value pairs that are attested in multiple languages
(Table 2).5 Additional features may be deﬁned in language-speciﬁc documentation for
use in individual languages. Some features are lexical, meaning that the same value
of the feature applies to the entire paradigm, that is, to all forms that share the same
lemma. Such features serve to further partition the space of word categories by pro-
viding distinctions that are more ﬁne-grained, or that cut across the boundaries of the

5 In the examples throughout this article, we show only selected Feature=Value pairs that we think are

useful to understand the example. The actual UD annotation may contain other features that we omit in
the interest of space.

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main UPOS categories. Prominent examples are PronType and NumType. For example, the
interrogative and indeﬁnite pronominal types are recognized with pronouns (who vs.
somebody), determiners (which vs. some), as well as with adverbs (where vs. somewhere).
Other features are inﬂectional, namely, different forms in a word’s paradigm may
have different values of the feature. A typical example, attested in many languages,
is Number: A noun may have a special form when referring to more than one entity, a
verb may cross-reference an argument and signal that it is a group of entities, and in
many languages the nominal and the verbal inﬂection coexist, possibly accompanied
by number inﬂection of other categories, such as adjectives. Finally, there are features
whose nature differs depending on the part-of-speech category. For instance, Gender
is a lexical feature of nouns but it is also an inﬂectional feature of words that show
morphological agreement with nouns, such as verbs or adjectives.

A feature may also be marked on a function word that contributes the feature to a
dissociated nucleus. For example, deﬁniteness of nouns is expressed morphologically
in Swedish (husen ‘the houses’ vs. hus ‘house(s)’), hence Deﬁnite is an inﬂectional feature
of Swedish nouns, but English nominals derive their deﬁniteness from deﬁnite or
indeﬁnite articles (as shown in Example (5) and Example (6)). These are function words
and the deﬁnite article is assigned a different lemma than the indeﬁnite article, hence
Deﬁnite is a lexical feature of articles (determiners) in English.

det

nsubj

cop

The
det
Deﬁnite=Def
PronType=Art

(5)

houses
noun
Number=Plur

are
aux
Mood=Ind|Tense=Pres
VerbForm=Fin|Voice=Act

new
adj
Degree=Pos

nsubj

cop

Husen
houses.Def
noun
Case=Nom|Deﬁnite=Def
Gender=Neut|Number=Plur

är
are
aux
Mood=Ind|Tense=Pres
VerbForm=Fin|Voice=Act

nya
new
adj
Degree=Pos
Number=Plur

(6)

‘The houses are new’

UD does not impose any universal constraints on compatibility between features and
part-of-speech categories. Any feature value can potentially occur with any UPOS tag.
However, constraints of this sort typically exist at the language-particular level. Hence,
for instance, the Number feature is deﬁned for English nouns and verbs but not adjectives,
while in Czech it is deﬁned for adjectives, too. The Case feature in English appears
marginally with certain pronouns and uses only two values, while in Czech it has seven
values and is deﬁned for nouns, adjectives, pronouns, determiners, and numerals.

In some languages, some features are marked more than once on the same word.
We say that there are several layers of the feature. The exact meaning of individual
layers is language-dependent. For example, possessive adjectives, determiners, and
pronouns may have two different values of both Gender and Number. One of the values is
determined by agreement with the modiﬁed (possessed) noun. This is parallel to other
(non-possessive) adjectives and determiners that agree in gender and number with the
nouns they modify. The other value is determined lexically because it is a property of

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the possessor. Layers are indicated by their identiﬁer in square brackets after the feature
name. For example, the Czech possessive pronoun náš ‘our’ is tagged Number[psor]=Plur to
indicate that the possessor’s number is plural. At the same time, the word form refers
to a singular possessee; this layer of the Number feature is considered default for Czech
possessives and needs no layer identiﬁer: Number=Sing.

Where necessary, UD allows language-speciﬁc features, for example, FocusType has
been used in the Niger–Congo language Wolof but it has not yet been established as
applicable in other languages. It is used with Wolof auxiliaries, which, among other
things, indicate whether the focus is on the subject of the clause, the verb, or the verb’s
complement (Dione 2019).

2.3 Grammatical Relations between Words

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of UD is its taxonomy of grammatical relations
between words.6 Each dependent of a head, and also any function words that belong
with a head, are connected to the head via a grammatical relation drawn from a uni-
versal typology of 37 grammatical relations, listed in Table 3. As discussed earlier, the
grammatical relations are organized around whether the head is the head of a clause
or nominal, and whether the dependent is a clause, nominal, or modiﬁer, although a
number of other distinctions and special cases, prominent in the world’s languages, are
also represented. Table 4 illustrates the organization of the grammatical relations. The
root relation is used for the root of the sentence, with a dummy head that does not need
to be explicit. The dep relation is used when no other relations are deemed appropriate.
The relations are illustrated throughout Section 3. The set of allowed relations is closed,
but UD allows relation subtypes separated from the main relation by a colon to provide
further distinctions or to capture language-speciﬁc constructions. For example, a num-
ber of languages mark relative clauses as acl:relcl and predeterminers as det:predet.

2.3.1 Usefulness of Grammatical Relations for Linguistic Typology. One of the basic tenets of
UD is that grammatical relations like subject and object provide a useful level of abstraction
to account for the complex mapping from overt coding properties like case-marking,
agreement, and word order to the underlying semantic predicate–argument structure
of sentences. In particular, they provide a happy middle ground of usually being easily
surface-form identiﬁable while being useful for crosslinguistic description.

In this respect, UD follows in the tradition of theories as diverse as relational gram-
mar (Perlmutter 1983), lexical-functional grammar (LFG) (Kaplan and Bresnan 1982;
Dalrymple 2001; Bresnan et al. 2016), word grammar (Hudson 1984, 1990), functional
generative description (FGD) (Sgall, Hajiˇcová, and Panevová 1986), meaning-text theory
(MTT) (Mel’ˇcuk 1988; Milicevic 2006), role and reference grammar (Van Valin, Jr. 1993),
and head-driven phrase structure grammar (Pollard and Sag 1994). Moreover, gram-
matical relations have always played a prominent role in linguistic typology, starting
with the pioneering works of Greenberg (1963) and then Comrie (1981), and continuing
in contemporary work like that of Croft (2001, 2002), Andrews (2007), Dixon (2009), and
Haspelmath (2011b). Although the universality of grammatical relations is sometimes
debated, their status as useful theoretical constructs for crosslinguistic studies is rarely
questioned.

6 We generally use the term grammatical relation rather than grammatical function or dependency label, but we

regard the terms as essentially synonymous—unlike, for example, Andrews (2007).

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Table 3
The 37 syntactic relations in UD, with a brief explanation of the relation and a reference to an
example.

Relation

acl
advcl
advmod
amod
appos

aux

case
cc
ccomp
clf

compound
conj
cop

csubj
dep
det
discourse
dislocated

expl

fixed

flat

goeswith

iobj
list
mark

nmod
nummod
nsubj

obj

obl
orphan
parataxis
punct
reparandum
root
vocative
xcomp

Deﬁnition

adnominal clause; ﬁnite or non-ﬁnite clause modifying a nominal
adverbial clause modifying a predicate or modiﬁer word
adverb or adverbial phrase modifying a predicate or modiﬁer word
adjectival modiﬁer of a nominal
appositional modiﬁer; a nominal used to deﬁne, name, or describe the referent of a
preceding nominal
auxiliary; links a function word expressing tense, mood, aspect, voice, or evidentiality
to a predicate
links a case-marking element (preposition, postposition, or clitic) to a nominal
links a coordinating conjunction to the following conjunct
clausal complement of a verb or adjective without an obligatorily controlled subject
(numeral) classiﬁer; a word reﬂecting a conceptual classiﬁcation of nouns linked to a
numeric modiﬁer or determiner
any kind of word-level compounding (noun compound, serial verb, phrasal verb)
conjunct; links two elements which are conjoined
copula; links a function word used to connect a subject and a nonverbal predicate to
the nonverbal predicate
clausal syntactic subject of a predicate
unspeciﬁed dependency, used when a more precise relation cannot be determined
determiner (article, demonstrative, etc.) in a nominal
discourse element (interjection, ﬁller, or non-adverbial discourse marker)
a peripheral (initial or ﬁnal) nominal in a clause that does not ﬁll a regular role of the
predicate but has roles such as topic or afterthought
expletive; links a pronominal form in a core argument position but not assigned any
semantic role to a predicate
ﬁxed multiword expression; links elements of grammaticalized expressions that be-
have as function words or short adverbials
ﬂat multiword expression; links elements of headless semi-ﬁxed multiword expres-
sions like names
links parts of a word that are separated but should go together according to standard
orthography or linguistic wordhood
indirect object; nominal core argument of a verb that is not its subject or (direct) object
links elements of comparable items interpreted as a list
marker; links a function word marking a clause as subordinate to the predicate of the
clause
nominal modiﬁer; a nominal modifying another nominal
numeric modiﬁer; numeral in a nominal
nominal subject; nominal core argument which is the syntactic subject (or pivot) of a
predicate
object; the core argument nominal which is the most basic core argument that is not
the subject, typically the most directly affected participant
oblique; a nominal functioning as a non-core (oblique) modiﬁer of a predicate
links orphaned dependents of an elided predicate
links constituents placed side by side with no explicit coordination or subordination
punctuation attached to the head of its clause or phrase
repair of a (normally spoken language) disﬂuency
root of the sentence
nominal directed to an addressee
clausal complement of a verb or adjective with an obligatorily controlled subject

Ex.

(28)
(27)
(20a)
(12)
(15)

(16c)

(9)
(23)
(26b)
(11)

(37)
(23)
(17a)

(25)

(10)
(20b)
(22b)

(22c)

(39)

(40)

(44)

(16c)
(46)
(27a)

(13)
(10)
(16)

(16)

(21)
(43)
(32)
(23b)
(45)
(16)
(22a)
(26a)

2.3.2 Core Arguments and Oblique Modiﬁers. In classifying grammatical relations, UD
distinguishes the core arguments of a predicate, essentially subjects and objects, from
all other dependents at the clause level, collectively referred to as oblique modiﬁers.
The core–oblique distinction is commonly assumed in typological linguistics (see, e.g.,
Thompson 1997; Andrews 2007) and is ultimately an information packaging distinction.

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Table 4
Typology of the syntactic relations.

Head \ Dependent Nominals

Clauses

Modiﬁer words

Function words

Clausal
core arguments

Clausal
non-core
arguments

Nominal
dependents

csubj
ccomp
xcomp

advcl

advmod
discourse

acl

amod

nsubj
obj
iobj

obl
vocative
expl
dislocated

nmod
appos
nummod

Coordination

MWE

Loose

Special

conj
cc

fixed
flat
compound

list
parataxis

orphan
goeswith
reparandum

aux
cop
mark

det
clf
case

Other

punct
root
dep

All or nearly all languages have a standard way of encoding the one or two arguments
of most verbs, and this unmarked form of argument expression deﬁnes core arguments
for that language. The speciﬁc criteria used to identify core arguments are ultimately
language-speciﬁc, but the following criteria recur in many languages:

• Verbs usually only agree with core arguments.

• Core arguments often appear as bare nominals while obliques are

marked by adpositions or other grammatical markers.

• Core arguments often appear in certain cases, traditionally called

nominative, accusative, and absolutive.7

• Core arguments in many languages occupy special positions in the

clause, often adjacent to the verb.

• Properties such as being the controller of a subordinate clause argument

are often limited to core arguments.

• Valency-changing operations such as passive, causative, and applicative
are often restricted to the promotion or demotion of core arguments.

UD assumes that all languages have a way of identifying usually two core arguments,
and reserves the relations of subject and object for these. If additional dependents that
are treated similarly to the basic core arguments appear in a clause, with or without
valency-changing operations targeting them, these are also regarded as core arguments.
For example, some languages allow indirect (or secondary) objects, while other lan-
guages do not.

It is important to note that status as a core argument is decoupled from the semantic
role of a participant. Depending on the meaning of a verb, many different semantic

7 See Section 4.4 for a discussion of ergative case.

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roles can be expressed by the same means of encoding core arguments. Nevertheless,
there is a correlation: Agent and patient or theme roles of predicates in their unmarked
valence are normally realized as core arguments. It is also important to note that the
core–oblique distinction has to do with the morphosyntactic encoding of dependents,
not with their status as obligatory or selected by the predicate. Thus, UD does not
assume the traditional argument–adjunct distinction found in many linguistic theories,
which we take to be sufﬁciently subtle and hard to apply consistently both within and
across languages that the best solution is to avoid it. This position has been defended
on theoretical grounds by Haspelmath (2014) and Przepiórkowski (2016), and is also
adopted for practical reasons in many treebanks, notably the Penn Treebank for English
(Marcus, Santorini, and Marcinkiewicz 1993). The distinction between core arguments
and oblique modiﬁers is only applied at the clausal level; all dependents of nominals
are treated as oblique.

2.3.3 UD as Tectogrammar. The emphasis on grammatical relations makes UD repre-
sentations similar to syntactic representations that are midway between surface con-
stituency and argument structure in multistratal theories, such as the f-structures in LFG
(Bresnan et al. 2016), the deep syntactic or tectogrammatical representations in multi-
stratal versions of dependency grammar (Sgall, Hajiˇcová, and Panevová 1986; Mel’ˇcuk
1988), or ﬁnal relations in relational grammar. In particular, UD captures the observed
surface predicate–argument structure rather than any sort of abstracted or underlying
deeper structure. However, being a monostratal theory, UD also needs to incorporate
aspects of surface realization, such as word order, function words, and morphologi-
cal inﬂections, which typically belong to a separate surface-oriented representation in
multistratal theories. As a result, UD representations end up looking like a hybrid of
deep and surface-oriented representations, but where the tree structure is primarily
determined by predicate–argument structure. We believe the failure to appreciate this to
be one of the primary causes for misunderstandings about the theoretical foundations of
UD. More speciﬁcally, this means that UD represents classic surface constituency only to
the level of demarcating clauses, nominals, and modiﬁers. The internal structure of each
of these phrases represents predicates and grammatical relations, somewhat similarly
to an LFG f-structure, an MTT SyntR, or an FGD tectogrammatical representation, and
commonly does not capture ﬁne details of surface constituency as regards auxiliary
verbs, adpositions, and so on.8

3. Analyzing Linguistic Constructions in UD

Having explained the basic principles of UD as a linguistic theory, we now illustrate
how this theory can be applied to a range of linguistic phenomena. We start with
nominals and (simple) clauses, as the most fundamental constructions, and gradually
move on to more complex phenomena, including some that are ubiquitous in language
use but not often discussed in grammars.

8 In contrast, Osborne and Gerdes (2019) and Gerdes et al. (2018) argue for and present a dependency

annotation model that does respect surface constituency, while other annotation schemes are closer to
(semantic) argument structure (Baker, Fillmore, and Lowe 1998; Palmer, Gildea, and Kingsbury 2005).

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3.1 Nominals

Nominals9 are a fundamental linguistic unit in all languages, and typically refer to
entities (in a wide sense). Nominals occur as core arguments of predicates and in a
range of other functions, including predicative uses. In the simplest case, a nominal
consists of a single head word, which is typically a noun (noun), proper noun (propn), or
pronoun (pron). Depending on the language, nominal head words may carry a number
of morphological features, of which the most common are gender (Gender), number
(Number), case (Case), and deﬁniteness (Deﬁnite). In the Swedish Example (7), the subject
nominal is the pronoun hon ‘she’, the indirect object nominal is the proper noun Dan,
and the direct object nominal is the noun boken ‘the book’.

obj

nsubj

iobj

Hon
she
pron

gav
gave
verb

Dan
Dan
propn

boken
book.Def
noun

(7)

‘She gave Dan the book’

3.1.1 Case Markers. Case marking is one of the strategies that languages use to encode
the grammatical function of a nominal. Case marking can be realized through mor-
phological inﬂection (captured in UD by the Case feature) or by clitics or adpositions
(prepositions and postpositions). In the interest of crosslinguistic parallelism, UD takes
a radical approach and treats all adpositions as case markers, attaching them to the
nominal head with the special case relation.10 This allows us to analyze the following
examples as both having a direct dependency relation from the predicate to the nominal
ﬁlling the (oblique) agent role of a passive, despite the fact that Czech Example (8) uses
a noun in the instrumental case (koˇckou) while Swedish Example (9) adds a preposition
(av):

nsubj:pass

aux:pass

obl:agent

Pes
dog.Nom

byl
was

honˇen
chased.Pass

koˇckou
cat.Ins

(8)

‘A/the dog was chased by a/the cat’

nsubj:pass

obl:agent

case

Hunden
dog.Def

jagades
chased.Pass

av
by

katten
cat.Def

(9)

‘The dog was chased by the cat’

9 The term nominal is roughly equivalent to the more commonly used term noun phrase. However, we

prefer the term nominal both because phrases are not primitive notions in UD and because we include
among nominals some constructions that would not normally be classiﬁed as noun phrases, notably,
prepositional phrases.

10 In the typological linguistics literature, Haspelmath (2019) also argues for a uniﬁed treatment of case

markers and adpositions, suggesting it is “very unclear how they could be distinguished consistently as
comparative concepts.”

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This means that prepositional (and postpositional) phrases are treated in UD as nomi-
nals, where the nominal head is the referential core while the adposition is a functional
marker. This can be seen as an instantiation of Tesnière’s notion of a dissociated nucleus
and does not entail that the adposition is seen as a syntactic dependent of the noun in
the narrow sense.

3.1.2 Determiners, Numerals, and Classiﬁers. Nominals headed by nouns often contain
determiners, which can be roughly divided into four classes: articles, demonstratives,
interrogatives, and quantiﬁers. Articles, like English a(n) and the, specify deﬁniteness or
related properties. They are obligatory in some languages (at least with some types of
nouns), and completely absent in others. Demonstratives, like Latin hic ‘this’, iste ‘that
(of yours)’ and ille ‘that’, anchor the noun phrase deictically and seem to be available
in all languages. Interrogatives, like English which, are used to form noun phrases that
can be used in interrogative (and sometimes relative) clauses. Quantiﬁers, like French
tout ‘all’, quelque ‘some’, and aucun ‘any’, specify quantity or existence of the referent.
In many languages, different determiners are in complementary distribution or have
special constraints on their cooccurrence and possible order. Regardless of whether a
noun phrase contains one or more determiners, UD uses the det relation to connect
them all directly to the nominal head, as illustrated in Example (10) below.

Nominals headed by nouns may also contain numerals, which express exact nu-
merical quantities (1, 2, 3, . . . ). Numerals resemble determiners and can often replace
them (one book vs. a book or this book) but have special properties in many languages, in
particular in relation to classiﬁers (see below), and UD therefore uses the special nummod
relation to connect a numeral to the head noun, as in Example (10). Note that the nummod
relation is only used for cardinal numerals (one, two, three). Ordinal numerals (ﬁrst,
second, third) are instead treated as adjectives both morphologically and syntactically.

det

nummod

all
det

these
det

three
num

books
noun

(10)

A classiﬁer is a word that accompanies a noun in certain grammatical contexts. The
prototypical case is that of numeral classiﬁers, where the word is used with a numeral
for counting objects and where the numeral normally cannot occur without the clas-
siﬁer. A classiﬁer generally reﬂects some kind of conceptual classiﬁcation of nouns,
based principally on features of their referents. UD uses the clf relation to connect the
classiﬁer to the numeral (or determiner) together with which it modiﬁes the noun, as in
Example (11) from Chinese.

nummod

clf

三
s¯an
three
num

个
gè
Clf
noun

学生
xuésh¯eng
student
noun

(11)

‘three students’

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det

clf

这
zhè
this
DET

辆
liàng
Clf
NOUN
‘this bus’

巴士
b¯ashì
bus
NOUN

The morphological analysis of classiﬁers is debated. Etymologically, classiﬁers are nor-
mally nouns, and UD generally recommends using the noun tag. It has been suggested
that a special feature should be added to distinguish the classiﬁer use, since the words
can normally also be used as regular nouns, but there is currently no such feature.

3.1.3 Adjectival and Nominal Modiﬁers. Adjectives modifying the head of a nominal are
linked to the head noun with the amod relation. Unlike case markers, determiners,
numerals, and classiﬁers, adjectives can be freely multiplied and can themselves be the
head of complex constructions involving modiﬁers of various kinds, as illustrated in
Example (12). A special case of adjectival modiﬁers are ordinal numerals (as in the second
Harry Potter book), which are analyzed as adjectives in UD.

advcl

det

amod

advmod

amod

mark

nsubj

a much harder mathematical problem than

det

adv

adj

noun

sconj pron

thought
verb

(12)

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The head of a nominal may also be modiﬁed by another nominal, whose head is then
linked to the higher noun with the nmod relation as in Example (13a). A special case is
the genitive construction as in Example (13b), which may occur with or without overt
case markers. Possessive pronouns, when used to modify nouns, are treated as a special
case of nominal modiﬁers. In many treebanks, the subtype nmod:poss is used both for
possessive pronouns Example (13c) and full genitive noun phrases Example (13b). How-
ever, if the grammatical rules of the language treat the possessive word analogously to
determiners (i.e., the possessive is not a nominal), det(:poss) is used as in the Croatian
Example (14).

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nmod

case

det

(13)

the
det

ofﬁce
noun

of
adp

the
det

chair
noun

nmod:poss

det

case

the
det

chair
noun

’s
part

ofﬁce
noun

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nmod:poss

her
pron

ofﬁce
noun

nmod

det

situacija
noun
situation.Nom

njegove
det
his.Gen
‘the situation of his country’

zemlje
noun
country.Gen

(14)

A special type of nominal modiﬁcation, recognizable in some languages, is apposition,
for which UD has a special appos relation. It connects two nominals that have the same
(or overlapping) referents, as exempliﬁed in Example (15). According to the UD criteria,
the two nominals involved in an appositive construction are syntactically independent,
can often be reordered, and are usually separated by a comma in writing. The appos
relation is also strictly left-to-right, meaning that the ﬁrst nominal is always treated as
the head. This is a more narrow-scoped deﬁnition than the notion of apposition found
in some grammars, which may also include modiﬁers that precede the head or that are
not themselves syntactically independent nominals.

appos

punct

det

ﬂat

amod

nmod

case

Robert Mugabe
propn

propn punct det

the former president of Zimbabwe

adj

noun

adp

propn

(15)

There are a number of additional structures that may appear in nominals, including
compounding and ﬂat structures (see Section 3.4.1 and 3.4.3, respectively), and clausal
modiﬁers, particularly in relative clauses (see Section 3.3.2).

3.2 Clauses

A clause consists of a predicate together with its core arguments and oblique modiﬁers.
In this section, we focus on simple clauses where dependents of the predicate are nom-
inals, adverbs, or function words. Complex clauses, where a subordinate clause acts as
a core or oblique dependent, are discussed in Section 3.3.

3.2.1 Predicates and Core Arguments. In most clauses, the main predicate is a verb, which
can be intransitive, transitive, or (in some languages) ditransitive, as illustrated in
Example (16a–16c).

root

nsubj

(16)

a. Maria

left

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root

nsubj

aux

obj

det

b. Maria

has

left

note

root

nsubj

aux

obj

aux

iobj

det

c. Maria

could

have

left

Pedro

note

In Example (16a), the intransitive verb left has a single core argument, a nominal subject
(nsubj). In Example (16b), the verb takes an additional core argument, a direct object
(obj). In Example (16c), ﬁnally, there is a third core argument analyzed as an indirect
object (iobj). In English, nominal core arguments are never introduced by prepositions.
Therefore, in a sentence like Maria could have left a note for Pedro, the prepositional phrase
for Pedro is analyzed as an oblique nominal dependent (obl) despite its near semantic
equivalence to Pedro in Example (16c). We introduced the problem of identifying core
arguments in Section 2.3.2 and will return to its crosslinguistic application in Section 4,
after we have completed the overview of grammatical constructions in UD.

Examples (16b) and (16c) also illustrate that auxiliary verbs are treated as depen-
dents of main verbs in UD with the aux relation. Auxiliary verbs help specify verbal
features such as tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality, or voice. They may also carry
agreement features that cross-reference the subject or other core arguments. The criteria
for distinguishing auxiliaries are again language-speciﬁc, but auxiliaries are always a
closed class and usually a small one. If there are multiple auxiliaries in one clause, a ﬂat
structure is created where all auxiliaries are attached directly to the main verb.

Another basic clause construction is that of nonverbal predication, where the main
predicate is not a verb but a noun or adjective which usually takes a single core argu-
ment analyzed as a nominal subject (nsubj). This is a common construction in most
languages, but languages differ in the strategies they use to realize the construction
morphosyntactically. This is illustrated in the examples below, which show equivalent
sentences in English Example (17a) and Waskia Example (17b).

nsubj

det

cop

(17)

The
det

houses
noun

are
aux

new
adj

nsubj

det

Kawam
houses
noun

mu
the
det

ititi
new
adj

‘The houses are new’

English uses a copula strategy, with a special verb linking the predicate to its subject,
while Waskia uses a zero strategy, with no overt linker. By attaching the subject to
the nonverbal predicate in both cases, UD highlights the similarity of the construction
across languages with different realization strategies. The copula verb is attached to

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the nonverbal predicate with the cop relation. Other auxiliaries are attached to the
nonverbal predicate with the aux relation, as in Example (18).

nsubj

aux

cop

det

The
det

houses
noun

could
aux

have
aux

been
aux

newer
adj

(18)

Many languages have ways of altering the mapping between the grammatical relations
and the semantic roles of a verb. Such transformations involve changing the form of the
verb (using morphology, auxiliaries, or both) as well as the encoding of its dependents.
For example, in the passive construction the original object is promoted to subject,
while the original subject either disappears or is demoted to an oblique modiﬁer. The
UD analysis acknowledges the new grammatical relations of dependents, and in this
case labels them as subject and oblique, respectively. Nevertheless, to signal that the
mapping from grammatical relations to semantic roles has changed, UD provides the
subtype nsubj:pass for the passive subject (and the subtype obl:agent for the oblique
modiﬁer). In addition, a passive auxiliary will be labeled aux:pass and a morphologi-
cally inﬂected verb will carry the feature Voice=Pass. Examples of passive constructions
can be found in Example (8) and Example (9).

While the passive removes a core argument, the causative construction instead adds
a new core argument. In the Basque examples below (Oyharcabal 2003), the intransitive
sentence Example (19a) is converted to the transitive Example (19b). Here the subtypes
nsubj:cau and obj:cau are used to signal the extended valency frame.

nsubj

aux

Katua
cat
noun
Case=Abs

hil
died
verb
Voice=Act
‘The cat died’

da
has
aux

(19)

nsubj:cau

obj:cau

aux

Haurrak
child
noun
Case=Erg

katua
cat
noun
Case=Abs

hilarazi
die.Cau
verb
Voice=Cau

du
has
aux

‘The child caused the cat to die’

Other valency-changing operations are antipassive, applicative, and the symmetric
voice in Western Austronesian languages. For broader typological considerations of
voice, see Section 4.

3.2.2 Oblique Modiﬁers. While predicates and their core arguments form the backbone
of a clause, predicates can also be modiﬁed in a number of different ways. A large and
relatively heterogeneous class of modiﬁers consists of adverbs, which modify either
the predicate or the entire clause with respect to categories such as manner (quickly

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in Example (20a)), polarity (not in Example (20a)), and speaker attitude (unfortunately
in Example (20a)). All of these modiﬁers are attached to the main predicate with the
advmod relation. For discourse particles and interjections, the discourse relation is used,
as illustrated in Example (20b).

advmod

nsubj

aux

advmod

obj

det

advmod

(20)

a. Unfortunately

they

did

not

build

the

road

quickly

enough

discourse

punct

nsubj

b. Okay

you

win

In addition to adverbs and discourse particles, oblique modiﬁers may also appear in
the form of nominals. The obl relation is reserved for nominals that are dependents
of clausal predicates11 but do not satisfy the criteria for being core arguments. This in-
cludes not only nominals whose function is similar to adverbial modiﬁers, like with ease
and this morning in Example (21a), but also nominals that are arguments semantically,
like on the evidence in Example (21b). The criteria for distinguishing the latter type from
core arguments is discussed in more detail in Section 4.

obl

nsubj

obj

det

case

det

(21)

She

solved

the

problem

with

ease

this

morning

obl

case

nsubj

det

They

relied

the

evidence

The obl relation covers most non-core nominal dependents of predicates, but there
are three special cases for which other relations are used, exempliﬁed below. First,
vocatives are nominals that are directed to an (imagined or real) addressee, as in
Example (22a). They are attached to the main predicate with the vocative relation. Note
that the vocative is not the subject of the imperative clause, even if it happens to refer to
the actor of the event (and a vocative could equally well occur in a declarative sentence
or a question). Second, dislocated nominals are nominals that occur peripherally (ini-
tially or ﬁnally) in a clause and that serve to contextualize or emphasize a participant of
the clause. They do not fulﬁll a core argument role in the clause but often have discourse

11 To be precise, oblique nominals and adverbial modiﬁers are used for modiﬁcation of non-nominals,

including modiﬁcation of adjectives and adverbs that are not clausal predicates. Because adjectives and
adverbs normally act as modiﬁers and their own modiﬁcation is possible but infrequent (Section 2.1.2),
UD reuses the modiﬁer phrase type and the relations advmod and obl rather than deﬁning new relation
types.

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prominence, such as being a topic, and are usually anaphorically related with a core
argument. The relationship is often coreference, such as in Example (22b), where the
nominal Peter introduces a topical referent, which is then picked up anaphorically by the
nominal object him, but there are also cases of bridging anaphora, such as the Japanese
topic Example (62) in Section 4.3. Third, expletives are pronominal forms that occur in
a core argument position but are not assigned any semantic role. A typical example is
the dummy subject of a weather verb, which occurs in English and other languages that
require the subject position to be ﬁlled in (non-imperative) clauses, as exempliﬁed in
Example (22c).12

vocative

punct

discourse

punct

obj

det

(22)

Peter

pass

the

butter

please

dislocated

punct

nsubj

aux

advmod

obj

n’t

him

expl

advmod

obl

case

amod

never

rains

Southern

California

3.3 Complex Constructions

In this section, we describe a variety of linguistic structures, which have in common
that they involve clauses embedded into larger structures through relations of coordi-
nation or subordination.13 It will not be possible to survey this class of constructions
exhaustively, so the emphasis is on illustrating the general principles underlying their
treatment in UD.

3.3.1 Coordination. All cases of coordination, at the clause Example (23a), phrase Ex-
ample (23b), or word Example (23c) level, receive the same analysis. UD in principle
assumes a symmetric relation between conjuncts, which have equal status as syntactic
heads of the coordinate structure. However, because the dependency tree format does
not allow this analysis to be encoded directly, the ﬁrst conjunct in the linear order is
by convention always treated as the parent of all other conjuncts. Coordinating con-
junctions and punctuation delimiting the conjuncts are attached to an adjacent conjunct
using the cc and punct relations, respectively.

12 A detailed discussion of different expletives and their treatment in UD can be found in Bouma et al.

(2018).

13 The only exception is phrase and word-level coordination, which is discussed together with clausal

coordination in Section 3.3.1 for convenience.

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conj

nsubj

obj

det

nsubj

(23)

They

saw the

ghost

and

they

ran

punct

conj

punct

det

aux

nsubj

obj

det

b. Would you like a banana , an apple or an orange ?

punct

obl

case

conj

aux

nsubj

obj

det

c. Would you like a banana before or after lunch ?

As pointed out by Gerdes and Kahane (2016), the attachment choice of the coordinating
element to an adjacent conjunct is motivated by structural properties in many lan-
guages, because they together constitute a phrase. Furthermore, such an analysis can
provide a parallel analysis for sentences introduced by a conjunct as in Example (24).

nsubj

(24) And

they

left

3.3.2 Subordination. UD distinguishes four types of subordinate clauses: clausal subjects
(csubj) as in Example (25); clausal complements (objects), divided into those with
obligatory subject control (xcomp) as in Example (26a) and those without (ccomp) as in
Example (26b); adverbial clause modiﬁers (advcl) as in Example (27); and adnominal
clause modiﬁers (acl), with relative clauses as an important subtype in many languages
Example (28).

csubj

obj

cop

ccomp

mark

advmod

mark

(25) What

to do next

is not

easy to determine

xcomp

nsubj

obj

mark

obj

det

(26)

She

told Fred to take

the

job

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ccomp

mark

nsubj

aux

obj

det

nsubj

obj

She

told Fred that he

should take

the

job

Following the principle of prioritizing relations between content words, the head of a
subordinate clause is its predicate, while markers of subordination (e.g., subordinating
conjunctions), if any, are attached to the head of the clause they are in, with the relation
mark. This leads to parallel analyses in English and in Turkish despite different strategies
for expressing the subordinated clause: The adverbial clause in English Example (27a)
is introduced by the subordinating marker as where Turkish uses the morphological
marker -çe Example (27b).

advcl

nsubj

obl

case

mark

nsubj

(27)

look at ﬂowers

I walk

advcl

obl

Yürüdükçe
walking

çiçeklere
ﬂowers.Dat

bakarım
I-look

‘I look at ﬂowers as I walk’

In the case of relative clauses as in Example (28), relative pronouns are attached to the
head of the relative clause with the relation corresponding to their grammatical function
in that clause (e.g., nsubj, obj, obl).

ccomp

nsubj

advmod

det

acl:relcl

aux

obl

nsubj

advmod

nsubj

obj

advmod

case

(28)

I doubt

the very few who read my blog have not come across this yet

The acl relation is also used for optional depictives, such as Example (29), which are
thus analyzed as reduced non-verbal clauses, modifying a nominal.

obj

nsubj

det

acl

(29) He

ate

the ﬁsh raw

All other secondary predicates (see Huddleston and Pullum [2002] ch. 4), optional
resultatives Example (30a), as well as obligatory depictives Example (30b) and obliga-
tory resultatives Example (30c), are treated as core arguments, following Huddleston
and Pullum (2002), and given an xcomp analysis. UD adopts the same analysis for
small clauses, such as Example (31), which share properties of obligatory secondary
predicates.

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det

nsubj

xcomp

obj

det

(30)

The

cold froze

the pond solid

nsubj

xcomp

They looked great

xcomp

nsubj

obj

They made

them heroes

xcomp

nsubj

obj

(31)

They made

them go

3.3.3 Parataxis. UD introduces the parataxis relation to capture clauses or other con-
stituents placed side by side without any explicit coordination or subordination, as in
Example (32). This subtype of parataxis can be viewed as a discourse-like equivalent
of coordination—whether or not there is punctuation (comma, semi-colon, or colon)—
and therefore we follow the same convention as coordination, with the ﬁrst constituent
being the parent.

parataxis

punct

nsubj

advmod

nsubj

cop

aux

xcomp

advmod

mark

obj

(32)

That

’s

ﬁne

n’t want

see

you

either

Some other constructions are also given a parataxis analysis: reported speech Exam-
ple (33), tag questions Example (34), interjected clauses Example (35), or interjected con-
stituents Example (36). In these cases, the added material is the parataxis dependent
(and the parent does not necessarily occur before the child).

parataxis

punct

obl

case

nmod:poss

amod

nsubj punct

nummod

compound

nsubj

cop

(33)

’s symptomatic , she said , of our fast-paced 24

hour

news

nsubj

punct

cop

parataxis

advmod

punct

nsubj

(34)

’s

not

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parataxis

punct

nsubj

obj

amod

punct

xcomp

nsubj

mark

obl

(35) Calaﬁa

has

great

fries

(

they

are

die

for

)

mark

parataxis

punct

nmod

punct

case

nsubj:pass

aux:pass

advcl

mark

nsubj

aux

obj

amod

(36)

If – wonder of wonders – you ’re worried that you might do something wrong

3.4 Multiword Expressions

The most regular process of sentence construction in human languages is for a word
to be able to take arguments and modiﬁers that themselves allow further expansion
with their own modiﬁers. For example, house can take a modiﬁer like decrepit, but that
modiﬁer can take its own modiﬁers and you can form an expression such as [really rather
decrepit] house. However, languages also include constructions where multiple words
form a compound or ﬁxed expression. Under a lexicalist approach, such multi-lexeme
units are fundamentally different from cases of phrasal modiﬁcation. UD provides three
relations to capture multiword expressions (MWEs), suggesting that these capture the
main distinctive groups of MWEs.

3.4.1 Compound. The ﬁrst, and best recognized, situation is compounding. The relation
compound is used for any kind of word-level compounding: noun compounds (e.g.,
phone book), but also verb and adjective compounds, such as a Japanese light verb
construction, such as benky¯o suru ‘to study’, or the serial verbs that occur in many
languages, such as this Nupe example:

nsubj

compound:svc

obj

Musa
Musa

bé
came

lé
took

èbi
knife

’Musa came and took the knife’

(37)

The compound relation is also used for phrasal verbs, such as put up: The adverb up
is attached to put via compound:prt. Compounds are seen as regular headed construc-
tions: The compound modiﬁcation relationships indicate the structure of the compound,
as shown in Example (38). This behavior distinguishes compounds from the other two
types of MWEs.

compound

(38)

a. USB

cell

phone

chargers

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compound

church

child

sex

abuse

3.4.2 Fixed. The fixed relation is used for highly grammaticalized expressions that
typically behave as function words or short adverbials. The name and rough scope of
usage is borrowed from the ﬁxed expressions category of Sag et al. (2002). Fixed MWEs
are annotated with a ﬂat structure. Because there is no clear basis for internal syntactic
structure, we adopt the convention of always attaching subsequent words to the ﬁrst
one with the fixed label Example (39).

conj

ﬁxed

nsubj

obj

ﬁxed

(39)

dogs

well

cats

obl

nsubj

xcomp

obj

det

case

ﬁxed

det

Je préfère prendre un dessert plutôt
rather
I

to-have

dessert

prefer

qu’ une
an
than

entrée
appetizer

‘I prefer to have a dessert rather than an appetizer’

As with other clines of grammaticalization, it is not always clear where to draw the
line between giving a regular syntactic analysis versus a ﬁxed expression analysis of
a conventionalized expression. In practice, the best solution is to be conservative and
to prefer a regular syntactic analysis except when an expression is highly opaque and
clearly does not have internal syntactic structure (except from a historical perspective).

3.4.3 Flat Multiword Expressions. The ﬁnal class of MWEs is flat. This class is less
clearly recognized in most grammars of human languages, but in practice there are
many linguistic constructions with a sequence of words that do not have any clear
synchronic grammatical structure but are not ﬁxed expressions. These include names
without internal syntactic structure, and calqued expressions from other languages. We
again adopt the convention that in these cases subsequent words are attached to the ﬁrst
word with the flat relation, as in Example (40).

nsubj

conj

ﬂat

cop

(40) Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ludwig van Beethoven are famous

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3.5 Ellipsis

The analysis of ellipsis poses a challenge for all linguistic theories, especially those that
do not make use of null nodes (or empty categories) to represent non-overt linguistic
elements. UD adopts a compromise solution in this respect. The strategy for analyzing
ellipsis is to preserve as many dependency relations as possible and resort to a special
relation, which explicitly marks the ellipsis, only when absolutely necessary. The rep-
resentation discussed here is restricted to overtly realized elements.14 The strategy is
realized as follows:

• If the elided element has no overt dependents, nothing is done.

• If the elided element has overt dependents, one of these is

promoted to the role of the head.

• If the elided element is a predicate and the promoted element is

one of its arguments or phrasal modiﬁers, the special orphan relation
is used when attaching other non-functional dependents to the
promoted head.

3.5.1 Ellipsis in Nominals. If a nominal head is elided, dependents are promoted as
head in the following priority order: amod > nummod > det > nmod > case. In German
Example (41a), the amod (rote ‘red’) of the elided noun (Bonbon ‘candy’) is promoted; in
Example (41b), the nummod (two) is.

conj

obj

det

obj

nsubj

amod

nsubj

nummod

Er kauft
buys
he

einen gelben Bonbon und sie
and she

yellow candy

kauft
buys

zwei
two

rote
red

(41)

‘He buys a yellow candy and she buys two red ones’

conj

obj

nsubj

nummod

nsubj

obj

She

saw three monkeys

and he

saw two

3.5.2 Ellipsis in Clauses. If the main predicate of a clause is elided, the aux, cop, or a mark
(in the case of an inﬁnitival marker) dependents of the elided predicate are promoted,
as illustrated in Example (42a), Example (42b), Example (42c), respectively.

conj

nsubj

obj

nsubj

advmod

(42)

Sue

likes pasta

and Peter does

too

14 In some cases, null nodes are used in the enhanced representation to better capture the

predicate–argument structure.

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nsubj

cop

conj

nsubj advmod

Sue

is hungry and Peter

too

nsubj

advcl

mark

aux

obj

nsubj

xcomp

They will do it

they want

If there is no aux or cop to promote (or mark in the special case of inﬁnitives), de-
pendents are promoted in the following priority order: nsubj > obj > iobj > obl >
advmod > csubj > xcomp > ccomp > advcl > dislocated > vocative. However, to
avoid confusion and to signal that the dependency structure is incomplete, the special
orphan relation is used to connect the non-promoted dependents to the promoted
dependent, as exempliﬁed in Example (43).

conj

nsubj

obj

orphan

(43)

tea

and you coffee

parataxis

nsubj

aux

obj

det

orphan

punct

case

They had left

the

company , many for good

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Note that the orphan relation is only used when an ordinary relation would be mislead-
ing (for example, when attaching an object to a subject). In particular, the ordinary cc
relation should be used for the coordinating conjunction, which attaches to the pseudo-
constituent formed through the orphan dependency, as shown in Example (43a) above,
and similarly for the punct relation in Example (43b).

Using the orphan relation in cases of predicate ellipsis results in a severely under-
speciﬁed predicate–argument representation but prevents the construction of a com-
pletely misleading dependency structure, where core argument and modiﬁer relations
are used to link words that are really co-dependents.

3.6 Miscellaneous Constructions Found in Corpora but Not Usually in

Grammar Books

The application of the UD framework to naturally occurring data revealed the existence
of several highly frequent constructions that are not discussed in comprehensive gram-
mars. We give examples here, and the analysis proposed under the UD framework.

3.6.1 Special Relations for Informal Genres. Contrary to edited texts, text coming from
informal genres, such as Web forums and social media data, and from speech transcripts
often contain words wrongly broken into multiple tokens. Examples are given in Exam-
ple (44a) where the French word for maybe is spelled over two tokens but should be one
(peut-être), and in Example (44b) where the English word nevertheless is split into three

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tokens. UD does not assume that a tokenization or normalization process can ﬁx all
these errors, and therefore provides a relation, goeswith, to indicate that these tokens
should be seen as one word. Analogously to the fixed and flat relations, we adopt the
convention of always attaching subsequent tokens to the ﬁrst one.

nsubj

cop

advmod

det

goeswith

advmod

Les
the

crêpes
crepes

sont peut
are may

être
be

trop cuites
baked
too

(44)

‘The crepes may be overcooked’

advmod

goeswith

nsubj

aux

b. Never

the

less

they are winning

Similarly, transcripts contain speech repairs. UD uses the reparandum relation to
indicate such disﬂuencies. The repair is chosen as the head because it constitutes the
ﬁnal utterance, with the disﬂuency being the dependent of the repair, as shown in
Example (45).

obl

case

det

reparandum

case

det

(45) Go to the

righ-

to the

left

3.6.2 Lists. When dealing with Web data, we frequently encounter passages, parsed as
single sentences, that are meant to be interpreted as lists. Email signatures are a typical
example of such lists, as in Example (46a). UD uses the list relation to link the different
elements, with the ﬁrst one being the head. In some cases, the ﬁelds in the list are
explicit, and take the form of a “key:value” structure. UD uses the appos relation to
link a value to its key, as in Example (46b).

list

ﬂat

(46)

a. Michiel Cock m.p.cock@vu.nl Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

list

ﬂat

list

ﬂat

appos

punct

appos

punct

b. Hilary E. Ackermann Goldman Sachs Phone : 212-902-3724 E-Mail : ha@gs.com

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3.6.3 Noun + Number/Letter Constructions. Another frequent construction in all UD cor-
pora is a noun followed by a number or a letter (or a combination of both), such as in
the English examples in Example (47).

(47)

a. This is the number one restaurant in town

b. He lives on ﬂoor four

c. Bus 102L takes you straight to the center

d. On day 2 of our trip, we hiked to the bottom of the canyon

e. The meeting will be in room A

For a uniform treatment across such constructions, UD treats them as noun–noun
constructions. While some of the examples above have an ordinal reading, such as
Example (47b) or Example (47d), where the expressions can be paraphrased respectively
as on the fourth ﬂoor and on the second day, UD analyzes the number as a noun to maximize
the parallelism with constructions that use a letter or a combination of both number and
letter; indeed, one can live on ﬂoor C where C acts as a noun. Therefore the number/letter
expression attaches to the noun it modiﬁes via a nmod relation, unless there is clear
morphosyntactic evidence in the language for the opposite direction.

3.6.4 Measure Phrases. The analysis of simple measure phrases, such as 5 years old or 25
meters long, is relatively straightforward, illustrated in Example (48): The number serves
to modify the meaning of the noun with a quantity and the measure noun is seen as
functionally corresponding to an adverbial modifying the adjective.

nummod

obl

(48)

meters

long

There are also complex measure phrases involving symbols, such as 1920 × 1080 pixels,
or ranges (5 – 6 meters). In such cases, the UD analysis follows the reading of the
expression in the language. For instance, in the English Example (49), the symbol acts
like a preposition by and is analyzed as such.

nummod

nmod

case

1920
num
1920
num

x
sym
by
adp

1080
num
1080
num

pixels
noun
pixels
noun

(49)

In some cases like in the Czech Example (50), the symbol is pronounced as a coor-
dinating conjunction. It is thus analyzed as a punctuation punct (see Section 3.3.1 on
coordination) and the numerical constituent as a coordination.

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nummod

conj

punct

5
num
pˇet
num
ﬁve

–
punct
až
cconj
to

6
num
šest
num
six

m
noun
metr ˚u
noun
meters

‘ﬁve to six meters’

(50)

4. Core Grammatical Relations: A Typological Perspective

One of the main challenges for a framework like UD is to ensure that universal cat-
egories are applied consistently across languages with sometimes radically different
morphosyntactic encoding strategies. This can only be achieved through a complex
interplay between abstract language-independent guidelines and concrete language-
speciﬁc criteria. In this section, we will outline how this idea can be realized for core
grammatical relations like subject and object, which play a central role in the UD
theory. After stating general criteria derived from the typological literature, we will
go through four groups of languages that illustrate different ways of instantiating the
general criteria relative to language-speciﬁc evidence. The ﬁrst group is what has been
called Standard Average European (Whorf 1956; Haspelmath 2001), which is a homo-
geneous group but with some subtle differences, exempliﬁed here by English, Czech,
and Spanish. The second group is a selection of large non-Indo-European languages—
Japanese, Arabic, and Swahili—which introduces more variety in the encoding of core
grammatical relations. The third group comprises languages exhibiting different forms
of ergativity, a phenomenon that is challenging for any theory based on the notions
of subject and object. The fourth group includes languages with voice systems that
are substantially different from the active–(middle)–passive that is found in the Indo-
European family.

4.1 General Criteria

The starting point is that core arguments can be recognized relatively easily based on
surface criteria such as word order, agreement, and case marking (both morphological
and syntactic). However, for any given language, one has to ﬁrst establish which of these
criteria apply. For example, many languages have a morphological case called “dative,”
but dative nominals act as core arguments in some languages (or uses), and as oblique
in other languages (or uses).

To determine which core arguments are available in a given language, and how they
are morphosyntactically encoded, it is useful to start with so-called primary transitive
clauses (Andrews 2007), that is, clauses with predicates that license the semantic roles
of agent (actor) and patient (undergoer) in the prototypical sense. Clauses where the
predicate is a verb describing a violent action are often good examples, such as George
killed the dragon. In such a clause, the predicate has two core arguments: The more active
argument (the agent) is said to have the grammatical function A; the other argument
(the patient) is said to have the grammatical function P. By observing the coding
strategies and grammatical rules that, within the language, are typical for arguments
with the functions A and P, we can identify these functions also with other predicates,

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regardless of their semantic roles. Such predicates will be called transitive and their
arguments will also have the functions A and P, respectively. For instance, John loves
Mary is a transitive clause, and John and Mary have the functions A and P, respectively,
because the grammar treats them the same way as George and the dragon in the earlier
example. The exact semantic roles are no longer important: John is an experiencer rather
than actor, and Mary may not be affected by his love; she may not even be aware of it.

When we can recognize a predicate with two core arguments, we can also recognize
predicates that have at most one (regardless of whether they also have additional non-
core dependents). Clauses headed by such predicates are intransitive and their single
core argument is said to have the grammatical function S. In general, nominals with
functions S and A are subjects and labeled nsubj, while arguments with function
P are objects and labeled obj. Finally, some verbs in some languages take three or
more core arguments, more than one showing behavior that is characteristic of objects
(Haspelmath 2015). Prototypically, such ditransitive constructions involve verbs of
giving and transfer, and UD analyzes the theme (i.e., the entity that is transferred) as
the direct object, and introduces the relation of indirect object (iobj) for the recipient.
However, as noted earlier, the iobj relation should only be used if the nominal denoting
the recipient is encoded as a core argument. In English, for example, this means that
the nearly synonymous sentences Mary gave John a book and Mary gave a book to John
differ in that the recipient is realized as an indirect object (John) in the former but as an
oblique modiﬁer (to John) in the latter.

We now discuss how these general principles can be applied to languages with
different encoding strategies, starting with familiar Indo-European languages and grad-
ually introducing more diversity.

4.2 Standard Average European

In Indo-European languages with case marking, nominative and accusative cases will
usually map to subject and object core arguments, respectively. When there is no case
marking, tests based on word order, pronominalization, and passivization can be used
to identify core arguments.

English. In English, nominal core arguments are bare nominals (that is, without preposi-
tions) and can be identiﬁed, to some extent, using word order. In an unmarked declara-
tive sentence, the core argument preceding the verb is the subject. If there is another core
argument following a transitive verb, it is the object, as in Example (16b). English has
a remnant of morphological case for some of the personal pronouns: Subject pronouns
are in the nominative form (I, he, she, we, they) whereas objects are in the accusative form
(me, him, her, us, them).

The main complication when drawing the core–oblique distinction in English is
that, while the presence of a preposition is a sufﬁcient condition for obliqueness, it is not
a necessary one. There are bare nominals that are used as oblique (temporal) modiﬁers,
as in Example (51b).

(51)

a. A baker works the dough

b. A baker works the whole week

c. John spends the whole week in Paris

The reasons why the whole week is not a core argument in Example (51b) (whereas the
dough and the whole week are core arguments in Example (51a) and in Example (51c),

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respectively) are complex, but we can use tests based on word order, pronominalization,
and passivization to establish that the whole week does not behave as a core argument in
Example (51b). An oblique modiﬁer (the whole week in Example (52a) and Example (52b))
can swap positions with a locational modiﬁer (e.g., in Paris), whereas this is not possible
for a core argument Example (52c) vs. Example (52d):

(52)

a. John works the whole week in Paris

b. John works in Paris the whole week

c. John spends the whole week in Paris

d. *John spends in Paris the whole week

Second, unlike a direct object, the temporal modiﬁer cannot be pronominalized:

(53)

a. *John worked it in Paris

b. John spent it in Paris

It is also not possible to promote a temporal modiﬁer to subject by passivization: (*The
whole week was worked by John). This test is not decisive by itself in English, as there are
transitive verbs that cannot passivize, and prepositional verbs that can. But taken all
together, the tests indicate that the whole week in Example (51b) is not an object, and it
will therefore attach to the verb with the obl relation.

Czech. Czech has substantive morphology that can be used to classify verbal arguments.
Core arguments in Czech are bare noun phrases in the nominative for the subject and
in the accusative for the object. Whereas SVO order is preferred by default, Czech word
order is free: Other permutations are possible and may be required to distinguish topic
and focus. Like in English, a bare accusative nominal is not necessarily a core argument.
It can be an oblique (temporal) modiﬁer, as celý téden ‘whole week’ in Example (54a) or
každou stˇredu ‘every Wednesday’ in Example (54b).

(54)

a. Pracuje celý

týden
works whole week
‘He/she works the whole week’

b. Pˇrichází každou stˇredu

comes
‘He/she comes every Wednesday’

every Wednesday

Many verbs in Czech take, in addition to a subject, a bare noun phrase in a case other
than accusative (i.e., in the dative, genitive, or instrumental). UD invariably treats these
as oblique (obl), as in Example (55).

nsubj

obl

Zuzana
Zuzana
propn
Case=Nom

pomohla Martinovi
helped
verb
Voice=Act

Martin
propn
Case=Dat

(55)

‘Zuzana helped Martin’

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Whether these non-accusative second dependents should be seen as core arguments
or not is debatable.15 There are examples of verbs that take non-accusative second
dependents and could be claimed to belong to transitive verbs (viz., pomohla ‘helped’ in
Example (55)). However, such examples are rare, and non-nominative, non-accusative
dependents tend to have semantic roles other than the proto-patient. Also, the treatment
of these dependents by grammatical rules such as passivization is different from the
treatment that accusatives receive. In Example (56a), which is the passive corresponding
to Example (55), Martinovi is not promoted to subject: It stays in the dative case, and the
passive predicate, instead of cross-referencing Martin’s masculine gender, stays in the
default neuter singular form. In contrast, the active sentence Example (56b) features
an accusative argument Martina, and when passivized in Example (56c), this argument
becomes the subject, taking the nominative form and triggering agreement both on the
passive participle and on the auxiliary. Thus, UD treats only nominative and accusative
dependents as core arguments in Czech.16

obl

bylo
was
aux

aux:pass

pomoženo
helped
adj
Voice=Pass

Martinovi
Martin
propn
Case=Dat

(56)

‘Martin was helped’

nsubj

obj

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Zuzana
Zuzana
propn
Case=Nom

políbila
kissed
verb
Voice=Act

Martina
Martin
propn
Case=Acc

‘Zuzana kissed Martin’

nsubj:pass

aux:pass

obl:agent

Martin
Martin
propn
Case=Nom

byl
was
aux

políben
kissed
adj
Voice=Pass
‘Martin was kissed (by Zuzana)’

(Zuzanou)
(by-Zuzana)
propn
Case=Ins

Spanish. Spanish is in many ways similar to English and Czech but does not adhere
to the rule that the presence of a preposition is a sufﬁcient condition for obliqueness.
Spanish uses the preposition a with animate direct objects, as in Example (57a). Such
objects, when pronominalized, use the accusative pronoun form Example (57b), and
they can be promoted to subjects in passive constructions. Inanimate direct objects
behave the same way except that they do not use the preposition. UD therefore treats a
nominal with the preposition a as a core argument when it is an animate direct object.

15 For German, Andrews (2007, pp. 182–183) leaves the question open while Foley (2007, p. 377) has no

doubt that the dative case is oblique.

16 We ignore here certain anomalies in the Czech case system that involve quantiﬁed nominals. In the

presence of a quantiﬁer, the quantiﬁed noun may take the genitive form although the whole quantiﬁed
phrase occupies a nominative or accusative position.

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obj

case

(57)

Vimos
we-saw

a
María
to María

‘We saw María’
obj

vimos
La
her
we-saw
‘We saw her’

Similarly to English or Czech, a bare nominal is not necessarily a core argument, again
with oblique temporal modiﬁers being a prime example, as in Example (58).

nsubj

obl

amod

det

Él
he

(58)

toda
trabaja
works
whole
‘He works the whole week’

la
the

semana
week

As mentioned in Section 3.2.1, some languages have two (or even more) object con-
structions, including Germanic and Bantu languages. For instance, in ditransitive con-
structions, the predicate has obj and iobj dependents (see Example (16c) for the
English example Maria could have left Pedro a note). Traditionally, Romance languages
have been viewed as lacking multiple object constructions, because there is always at
most one bare object nominal, and other nominals are expressed with adpositions (as
Example (59a) in Spanish).

obl

nsubj

obj

det

case

María
María
propn

dejó
left
verb

una
a
det

nota
note
noun

a
to
adp

Pedro
Pedro
propn

(59)

‘María left a note for Pedro’

nsubj

obl

obj

det

María
María
propn

dejó
left
verb

le
him
pron
Case=Dat
‘María left him a note’

una
a
det

nota
note
noun

Still the dative seems to have something of a special status. Part of the evidence is the
availability of dative clitics, as in Example (59b) (though French also has partitive and
locative clitics); other evidence comes from relation-changing operations like causatives.
Some people have argued for Romance datives being core arguments (Van Peteghem

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2006; Boneh and Nash 2012; Pineda 2013, inter alia) though others have argued against
it (Kayne 1984, inter alia).

4.3 A Sample of Non-Indo-European Languages

In this section, we extend our discussion of core arguments in UD to three unrelated
non-Indo-European languages, each with a large number of speakers: Japanese, Arabic,
and Swahili.

Japanese. In Japanese, while there is a predominant word order, there is considerable
word order ﬂexibility and nominal arguments can be freely omitted Example (60b).
Grammatical relations are mainly expressed by case particles, which we regard as
adpositions bearing the grammatical relation case Example (60a).

nsubj

case

太郎
Tar ¯o
Taroo
propn

が
ga
Subj
adp

本
hon
book
noun

obj

を
o
Obj
adp

aux

持って
motte
holding
verb

います
imasu
is
aux

(60)

‘Taroo has the book’

discourse

aux

持って
motte
holding
verb

る
ru
be
aux

よ
yo
Emph
part

‘(I’ve) got (it)!’

Japanese, like other East Asian languages, is a strongly topic-oriented language. Topics
are marked with the case adposition は. Most commonly the topic-marked nominal will
be the subject or another regular dependent of the clause, and は will then either replace
(for nsubj or obj) or augment (for oblique dependents) the normal case adposition.

nsubj

case

太郎
Tar ¯o
Taroo

お金
は
wa
okane
Subj money

obj

を
o
Obj

aux

持って
motte
holding

います
imasu
is

(61)

‘Taroo has money’

However, a topic may also represent the context of the remainder of the sentence
while not being part of the predicate-argument structure. A nominal that establishes
a discourse context in this way takes the relation dislocated:

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dislocated

case

nsubj

case

象
z ¯o
elephant

は
wa
Topic

鼻
hana
nose

が
ga
Subj

長い
nagai
long

(62)

‘The elephant’s nose is long’

Although basically a head-ﬁnal language, in spoken Japanese, nominal dependents and
nominal dependents of dependents can also sometimes appear after the verb, as a kind
of afterthought. These are also treated as dislocated elements:

advmod

nsubj

dislocated

case

punct

case

昨日
kin ¯o
yesterday

(63)

太郎
Tar ¯o
Taroo
‘Taroo bought it yesterday, a car’

買った ,
katta
,
bought

が
ga
Subj

車
kuruma
car

を
o
Obj

Arabic. Arabic verbs cross-reference the person, number, and gender of their subjects.
Nominals are case-marked: The subject is in the nominative, the object in the accusative
(except in subordinate clauses with conjunction ˘anna ‘that’ Example (65a), where the
subject is also in the accusative). Multiple word orders are possible, subject–verb–object
and verb–subject–object being the most frequent. Passive clauses are agentless in Classi-
cal Arabic (Fischer 1997, p. 210) but oblique agent phrases are re-introduced in Modern
Standard Arabic (Badawi, Carter, and Gully 2013, p. 385). The vowel pattern a- ¯u of the
active verb in Example (64a) is replaced by the passive pattern u-¯a in Example (64b).
Furthermore, the masculine preﬁx y- is replaced by feminine t- to reﬂect the gender of
the passive subject ba˙gd¯adu.

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Subject pronouns can be dropped. Object pronouns are encliticized to the verb Exam-
ple (65a) but treated as syntactic words in UD. In ditransitive clauses Example (65b),
the verb governs two accusative objects; the recipient precedes the theme and, if
pronominal, it is encliticized to the verb. Bare accusative nominals are not always core
arguments; they can be adjuncts—for example al-˘usb ¯u˘a al-m¯ad. iya ‘last week’ in Exam-
ple (65c). Such ‘adverbial accusatives’ can denote time, location, direction, motivation,
manner, and so forth (Fischer 1997, p. 216).

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Swahili. In Swahili, core arguments are primarily marked by cross-referencing on the
verb. There is no case marking and word order is relatively free, although subjects
tend to precede and objects tend to follow the verb. Cross-referencing of the subject
is obligatory, as illustrated in Example (66a–66e), where the preﬁx a- consistently marks
the subject as third person singular. In transitive clauses, cross-referencing of the direct
object is obligatory if it is animate, as in Example (66b) where the preﬁx m- marks the
object as third person singular, but optional if it is inanimate, as in Example (66c). In di-
transitive clauses, it is the object highest in animacy that is cross-referenced regardless of
grammatical relation. Ditransitive clauses may be formed by an inherently ditransitive
verb, as in Example (66d), or by an applicative transformation on a transitive verb, as
in Example (66e), where the applicative sufﬁx -i extends the valency frame of the verb
pik ‘cook’ with an additional (indirect) object. The fact that the additional dependent is
cross-referenced on the verb like any animate object supports its status as a third core
argument.

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nsubj

Juma
Juma
propn

alicheka
laughed
verb
Person=3|Number=Sing

(66)

‘Juma laughed’

Juma
Juma
propn

nsubj

obj

alimkuta
met
verb
Person=3|Number=Sing
Person[obj]=3|Number[obj]=Sing
‘Juma met Asha’

nsubj

obj

Asha
Asha
propn

alipika
cooked
verb
Person=3|Number=Sing
‘Juma cooked food’

chakula
food
noun

obj

nsubj

iobj

Juma
Juma
propn

aliwapa
gave
verb
Person=3|Number=Sing
Person[iobj]=3|Number[iobj]=Plur

watoto
children
noun

chakula
food
noun

‘Juma gave children food’

obj

nsubj

iobj

Juma
Juma
propn

aliwapikia
cooked
verb
Person=3|Number=Sing
Person[iobj]=3|Number[iobj]=Plur

watoto
children
noun

chakula
food
noun

‘Juma cooked food for children’

4.4 Ergativity

As discussed in Section 4.1, UD generally assumes that the nsubj relation covers the
grammatical functions S and A, while obj is reserved for the grammatical function P.
This ﬁts well with the nominative–accusative alignment found in many languages, but
it is challenged by the ergative–absolutive alignment that groups S and P together. For
many languages, ergative–absolutive case marking appears to be only a morphological
feature, which we handle at the level of the Case feature. Basque, below, is an example.
For other languages, ergativity has been argued to extend to the treatment of grammati-
cal relations (Dixon 1994). There are then multiple possible analyses (and different ones
may apply to different languages). One choice is to regard the ergative as an oblique
(Mel’ˇcuk 1988), essentially analyzing all sentences in the language as intransitive, with
only one core argument marked in the absolutive, which is used for intransitive argu-
ments and the patient-like argument of transitive verbs. A more frequent analysis is to

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say that such syntactically ergative languages treat the intransitive core argument and
the patient-like argument of transitives together as a “pivot” (Dixon 1994), which we
would analyze as a subject (nsubj), and then the agent-like argument of transitives is
also a core argument, which we would analyze as an object (obj). The unusual thing,
then, is the reversed alignment between semantic roles and grammatical relations. This
is a place where the relation subtype :pass can be usefully used in an extended sense. If
we regard it as marking not only passives but all cases where the nsubj does not mark
the agent-like argument of the verb, then all transitive subjects in such a language are
nsubj:pass. In addition, we can reuse the subtype :agent, which in other languages is
optionally used for an oblique modiﬁer denoting a demoted agent, to mark the ergative
core argument as obj:agent.

Basque. In Basque (Zúñiga and Fernández 2019), nominal case morphology is the main
indicator of core argument relations. However, instead of nominative–accusative, the
core pair of cases is ergative–absolutive. Most two-argument verbs have the more agen-
tive argument in the ergative and the patient-like argument in the absolutive case, while
single argument verbs usually use the absolutive for their single argument. Neverthe-
less, there is no evidence that absolutives form a coherent grammatical relation. Rather,
the ergative argument is treated as subject (nsubj), while the absolutive argument of
transitives is object (obj), as in Example (67).

nsubj

obj

aux

Ekaitzak
storm
noun
Case=Erg

itsasontzia
ship
noun
Case=Abs

hondoratu
sunk
verb

du
has
aux

(67)

‘The storm has sunk the ship’

The single argument of intransitive verbs takes mostly the absolutive Example (68) but
sometimes the ergative form Example (69). It is labeled as subject (nsubj) in both cases.

nsubj

aux

Gizona
man.Def
noun
Case=Abs

hil
died
verb

da
has
aux

(68)

‘The man has died’

nsubj

aux

Urak
water
noun
Case=Erg

irakin
boiled
verb

du
has
aux

(69)

‘The water has boiled’

The third core argument case is the dative. Arguments in all three core cases are cross-
referenced on ﬁnite verbs and can be omitted. Some experiencer-subject two-argument
verbs take dative + absolutive, instead of ergative + absolutive, as in Example (70).

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nsubj

obj

aux

(Niri)
to-me
pron
Case=Dat

ardoa
wine
noun
Case=Abs

gustatzen
pleasing
verb

zait
is
aux

(70)

‘I like wine’

According to Zúñiga and Fernández (2019), the dative encodes the A function in such
constructions, which makes it subject in UD. Supporting evidence for this is provided
by causativization, a valency-changing operation that takes a transitive clause, adds
a third, ergative argument, and switches the original subject to the dative (unless it
already was in dative). The fact that causativization is available for dative–absolutive
clauses supports our treatment of the dative argument as the subject.

Jirrbal. Jirrbal or Dyirbal (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) (Dixon 1972, 1994) is a famous case
of a language that has been argued to have transitive clauses with an S and P pivot. It
has a combination of ergative–absolutive case marking on nouns (similar to Basque),
as in Example (71a) and Example (72a), and nominative–accusative case marking on
pronouns, as in Example (71b) and Example (72b), a common pattern of split ergative
case marking. In both cases, in transitive clauses, we treat the P pivot core argument as
the nsubj and the A core argument as an obj, but we mark them for unusual semantic
role alignment with nsubj:pass and obj:agent, respectively.

nsubj

Nguma
father
noun
Case=Abs

banaganyu
returned
verb
Tense=Nfut

(71)

‘Father returned’
nsubj

Nyurra
you.all
pron
Case=Nom

banaganyu
returned
verb
Tense=Nfut

‘You all returned’

det

nsubj:pass

obj:agent

Banggun
the
det
Case=Erg

(72)

296

yibinggu
woman
noun
Case=Erg

bayi
the
det
Case=Abs
‘The woman saw the man’

yara
man
noun
Case=Abs

buran
saw
verb
Tense=Nfut

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obj:agent

nsubj:pass

Ngaja
I
pron
Case=Nom

nginuna
you
pron
Case=Acc
‘I saw you’

buran
saw
verb
Tense=Nfut

There are several grammatical processes, such as relativization, which, when restricted
in application in a language, frequently only apply to subjects. The motivation for the
above analysis is that in Jirrbal these processes apply to the S and P core arguments.
For instance, the role of the head noun in a relative clause must be S or P, allowing
relative clauses like Example (73a) where the relativized role is P, but not a relative
clause where the relativized role is A. To express such an idea, the relative clause must
be antipassivized, making the previous P into an oblique and the previous A into an S
pivot, as in Example (73b).

obj:agent

det

acl:relcl

det

nsubj:pass

advmod

Banggu yugunggu gunbanguru banggul yaranggu ngayguna birriju balgan

that
det
Case=Erg

tree
noun
Case=Erg

cut
verb

that
det

VerbForm=Part Case=Erg

man
noun
Case=Erg

I
pron
Case=Acc

almost
adv

hit
verb
Tense=Nfut

(73)

‘The tree which the man had cut nearly fell on me’

nsubj

obl

det

acl:relcl

det

Bayi
that
det

yara
man
noun

jilwalngangu
kick
verb

bagun
that
det

gudagu
dog
noun

yanu
went
verb

Case=Abs Case=Abs VerbForm=Part|Voice=Antip Case=Dat Case=Dat Tense=Nfut
‘The man who kicked the dog went’

As another example, the shared arguments in coordinated clauses must be S or P pivot
core arguments, allowing the normally unexpected coordination in Example (74) but
not allowing ‘Mother saw father and heard the child’ with a shared argument, except
by antipassivization of the second clause. Again, this is most naturally handled by
recognizing an S/P pivot which is analyzed as the nsubj in UD.

nsubj:pass

conj

obj:agent

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Nguma
father
noun
Case=Abs

yabunggu
mother
noun
Case=Erg

buran
saw
verb
Tense=Nfut
‘Mother saw father and the child heard (him)’

child
noun
Case=Erg

heard
verb
Tense=Nfut

jajanggu ngamban

(74)

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4.5 Other Voice Systems

In European languages, the contrast between the active and passive voice is an im-
portant factor in categorizing simple clauses and their arguments. Ergative languages
sometimes have an analogous contrast between the active and the antipassive. Yet
there are languages whose voice systems do not seem to ﬁt easily into either of these
patterns. In this subsection, we ﬁrst look at Tagalog, a representative of the Philippine-
type languages, which are sometimes subsumed in a larger group of symmetrical voice
languages (Himmelmann 2005). Then, we will discuss the direct–inverse voice system
of Algonquian languages, exempliﬁed by Plains Cree.

Tagalog. The arguments in Tagalog are marked by function words that could be analyzed
as either prepositions, or case-bearing determiners; the former analysis is adopted
here.17 Although adpositions are often associated with oblique arguments and adjuncts,
we have seen that it is not a universal rule. Spanish marks an animate direct object with
the preposition a, and in Japanese all arguments are marked by postpositions, including
the subject and the direct object.

The most subject-like argument (again called the pivot) is marked by the preposition
ang. Other core arguments (if any) are marked by the preposition ng (Kroeger 1993,
pp. 40–47). A different set of prepositions is used with proper nouns. Personal pronouns
are not used with prepositional markers but inﬂect for case. Verbs are marked with
inﬁxed voice markers.

There is disagreement about whether the pivot is a subject and whether Tagalog has
a subject at all. Andrews (2007, pp. 210–211) distinguishes two grammatical relations,
the a-subject and the p-subject, each having some properties that are often associated
with subjects in European languages. He also says that the actor “has subject-like
properties regardless of whether or not it is the pivot. ”For the purpose of easy and
consistent annotation of UD, it is advantageous to follow the analysis of Manning
(1996) and to always reserve the nsubj relation for the ang-phrase (the pivot), as in
Example (75a). In the transitive sentences in Example (75b–c), different voices give
different alignments of semantic roles to grammatical relations. We mark prepositions
and personal pronouns with the Case feature: the pivot with nominative, and the other
core argument(s) with genitive.18

nsubj

case

Natalisod
tripped
verb
Voice=Act

ang
the
adp
Case=Nom
‘The woman tripped’

babae
woman
noun

(75)

17 There is no standard terminology for these words in the literature. Some authors classify them as

prepositions (e.g., Schachter and Shopen 2007, p. 35), some as articles or determiners (e.g., Dryer 2007,
pp. 94–95 and 121–122), and many authors avoid either of the terms and use the term “markers” instead
(e.g., Andrews 2007, p. 203).

18 The names for the cases are not without controversy either. If the subject is nominative, the other core

argument could be expected to be accusative, but due to its other functions, Tagalog ng is often glossed as
genitive (Himmelmann 2005). The nominative–accusative analysis has been advocated by some authors
(e.g., Guilfoyle, Hung, and Travis 1992), while others prefer to analyze Tagalog as an ergative–absolutive
language (e.g., Payne 1982; De Guzman 1988; Gerdts 1988), which would mean that the pivot is in the
absolutive and the ng-phrase in the ergative.

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obj

nsubj

case

Naglilinis
cleans
verb
Voice=Act

siya
he/she
pron
Case=Nom

adp
Case=Gen
‘She cleans a/the house’

bahay
house
noun

nsubj:pass

obj:agent

case

Nililinis
cleans
verb
Voice=Pass

niya
he/she
pron
Case=Gen

ang
the
adp
Case=Nom

bahay
house
noun

‘She cleans the house’

Despite the fact that we conveniently reuse the active and passive voice labels, it has
to be understood that this alternation is signiﬁcantly different from the active–passive
alternation in English. Both clauses are transitive, as the non-subject argument stays
core; in an English passive clause, the actor would be demoted to an oblique dependent.
The construction in Example (75c) is neither less frequent nor morphosyntactically more
complex than Example (75b). That is why the Austronesian voice system has been
described as symmetrical; rather than “active” and “passive,” the voice labels should
be read as “agent/actor-focus” and “patient/theme-focus,” respectively.

Locative, directional, and benefactive nominals are normally coded as oblique
(e.g., the dative sa sako ‘from sack’ in Example (76a)). However, there are additional
voices where these nominals become subjects, such as the location-focus voice in Exam-
ple (76b) and the beneﬁciary-focus voice in Example (76c). One of the reasons why a
dependent is promoted to the subject is that the subject is understood as the topic of the
sentence.19

obl

obj

nsubj

case

Magaalis
will-take-out
verb

ang
babae
the woman
adp

noun

ng bigas
rice

bata
to child
adp noun adp noun adp adp noun

sa sako para sa
sack for
off

(76)

Voice=Act Case=Nom
‘The woman will take some rice out of a/the sack for a/the child’

Case=Gen

Case=Dat

19 The “focus” in the names of the voices indicates that the verb “focuses” on a particular semantic role and

it should not be confused with pragmatic focus, which is the opposite of “topic.”

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obl

nsubj:lfoc

iobj

obj:agent

case

Aalisan
will-take-out
verb

adp

babae
woman
noun

ng bigas ang sako para sa

bata
to child
adp noun adp noun adp adp noun

sack for

rice

the

Voice=Lfoc Case=Gen
‘A/the woman will take some rice out of the sack for a/the child’
nsubj:bfoc

Case=Nom

Case=Gen

Case=Dat

obl

iobj

obj:agent

case

Ipagaalis
will-take-out
verb

adp

babae
woman
noun

ng bigas
rice

sa sako ang bata
sack the child
off
adp noun adp noun adp noun

Voice=Bfoc Case=Gen

Case=Gen
‘A/the woman will take some rice out of a/the sack for the child’

Case=Nom

Case=Dat

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Because the agent and patient stay core arguments even in the locative and beneﬁciary
voices, Example (76b) and Example (76c) are ditransitive clauses with three core argu-
ments. In contrast, the verbs of giving, which are typical representatives of ditransitive
predicates in other languages, form a standard transitive clause in the “active” and
“passive” voices, with the recipient coded as a directional (dative) oblique dependent,
as in Example (77).

obl

obj

nsubj

case

Nagbigay
gave
verb

ang
the
adp

lalaki
man
noun

Voice=Act Case=Nom

adp
Case=Gen

libro
book
noun

sa
to
adp
Case=Dat

babae
woman
noun

(77)

‘The man gave a book to the woman’

Plains Cree. The Algonquian (North American) language Plains Cree (Wolvengrey 2011)
cross-references one or two core arguments by verbal inﬂection, which is sufﬁcient to
allow for a relatively free word order. As in many other languages where person and
number of an argument is cross-referenced by the verb, the argument does not need to
appear overtly. The distinguishing feature of the verb forms in Example (78) is voice:
Example (78a) is in the direct voice (Dir), where higher arguments in the obliqueness
hierarchy are taken to be more agent-like, whereas Example (78b) is in the inverse voice
(Inv), where lower arguments are taken to be more agent-like. Given that ﬁrst person
arguments are higher than third person arguments, the agent is ‘we’ and the patient is
‘they’ in Example (78a), and inversely in Example (78b).

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(78)

a. Niw¯ıcih¯an¯anak

1Plur[high]-help-Dir-3[low]-Plur[low]
‘We help them’
b. Niw¯ıcihikon¯anak

1Plur[high]-help-Inv-3[low]-Plur[low]
‘They help us’

Arguments cross-referenced by the verb are without doubt core arguments. It is not
so obvious how to label the two arguments, as Plains Cree does not clearly have a
subject in the Indo-European sense. It is one of a number of languages where evidence
for differentiating core grammatical relations except via semantic role seems limited or
non-existent. Nevertheless, it seems best to postulate that the argument higher in the
obliqueness hierarchy should get the label nsubj in UD; the other core argument then
gets obj. Such a distinction can be annotated easily and consistently. The subject will be
more agent-like in the direct voice, and more patient-like in the inverse voice. This can
be signaled by labeling non-agentive subjects as nsubj:pass without explicitly claiming
that such sentences are passivized, unlike Dahlstrom (1991).

If two animate third-person arguments are involved, one of them is considered
proximate (more topical, higher in the obliqueness hierarchy) and the other is considered
obviative (less topical, lower in the obliqueness hierarchy). The obviative noun is marked
morphologically by the sufﬁx -a. We deﬁne a language-speciﬁc morphological feature,
Obviation, with the values Prx and Obv, to represent this. In Example (79a), M¯eriy is
proximate, hence it is the subject, and it is also the agent because the verb is in the
direct voice. In Example (79b), C¯aniy is proximate and thus the subject; however, M¯eriy
is still the agent because the verb is in the inverse voice.

obj

nsubj

C¯an¯ıwa
Johnny
propn
Obviation=Obv

k¯ı-w¯ıcih¯ew
helped
verb
Voice=Dir
‘Mary helped Johnny’

M¯eriy
Mary
propn
Obviation=Prx

nsubj:pass

obj:agent

C¯aniy
Johnny
propn
Obviation=Prx

k¯ı-w¯ıcihik
helped
verb
Voice=Inv
‘Mary helped Johnny / Johnny was helped by Mary’

M¯er¯ıwa
Mary
propn
Obviation=Obv

(79)

Even though Plains Cree does not use morphological cases to distinguish agents from
patients, nouns have a locative case (Case=Loc) that marks the noun as oblique and
unable to be cross-referenced by verbal inﬂection.

obl

obj

Akocikanihk
shelf
noun
Case=Loc

nik¯ı-ah¯awak
I-put
verb
Voice=Dir

nitastisak
my-mitts
noun
Case=Nom

(80)

‘I put my mitts on the shelf’

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While much work remains to be done in descriptive linguistics and its implementation
in UD, we hope that this survey of typologically different languages has shown that UD
provides a workable framework for the description and annotation of a broad range of
clause-marking choices.

5. Design Principles of UD

There are many different ways that UD could have been designed. In this section, we
brieﬂy motivate and explain the design principles that guided us. Importantly, what
UD seeks to achieve is rather different to what a grammar formalism in theoretical
linguistics typically seeks to achieve, and thus the outcome is quite different.

The overarching goal of UD is a crosslinguistically consistent universal grammar
that is suitable for use by the common person. That is, UD should be informed by
our linguistic knowledge and the typology of language variation, but it should be
something simple and interpretable enough that a psychologist, a software engineer,
or a high school English teacher can comfortably use it. Behind this goal is a belief that
there is something in common between human languages to be captured; as Bresnan
et al. (2016, p. 1) argues, “there must be . . . a common organizing structure of all lan-
guages that underlies their superﬁcial variations in modes of expression.” From a lin-
guistic point of view, such a common organizing structure is necessary for comparative
linguistic studies and a substantive theory of crosslinguistic typology. From a practical
NLP viewpoint, a common framework is needed to make it easy to build and maintain
multilingual NLP systems, to allow effective crosslinguistic transfer learning, to enable
meaningful crosslinguistic comparisons of parsing difﬁculty, and to approach the goal
of a universal parser that works for all languages based on modern universal neural
encodings of text (see, e.g., Kondratyuk and Straka 2019).

In choosing a common organizing structure for human language, UD applies a ver-
sion of the Goldilocks principle: We should aim to maximize the commonality between
languages but not to an extent that it obscures genuine differences between languages.
Seeking commonality, it is a mistake if a parallel morphosyntactic notion is unneces-
sarily annotated inconsistently across different languages. Seeking ﬁdelity, we avoid
annotating things that are actually different (such as morphological vs. periphrastic
expression of tense) as if they were the same. As a special case, UD eschews annotating
things that are not there (empty items), because this is usually an artiﬁcial device to
increase parallelism. Practically, we deal with quirky features of particular languages
by insisting on use of a universal taxonomy of categories, features, and relations, but
allowing the use of language-speciﬁc elaboration via subcategories. While the pressure
in theoretical linguistics is for representations to become more and more detailed and
complex over time, for UD, we realize that often less is better.

The secret to understanding the design and success of UD is to realize that the

design is a very subtle compromise between a number of competing criteria:

1. UD needs to be reasonably satisfactory on linguistic analysis grounds for

individual languages—a journeyman’s universal grammar.

2. UD needs to be good for linguistic typology: It should bring out crosslinguistic

parallelism across languages and language families.

3. UD must be suitable for rapid, consistent annotation by a human annotator.

4. UD must be easily comprehended and used by non-linguist users with prosaic

needs.

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5. UD must be suitable for computer parsing with high accuracy.

6. UD must support well downstream language understanding tasks, such as
relation extraction, reading comprehension, machine translation, and so on.

We observe that it is very easy to come up with a proposal that improves UD on one of
these dimensions. The interesting and difﬁcult part of developing UD has been working
to improve the scheme and annotation guidelines while remaining sensitive to all these
dimensions. Compare the analogy that school children are taught that English has eight
parts of speech: Noun, Verb, Adjective, Adverb, Pronoun, Preposition, Interjection,
Conjunction. This is not really true, but it has enough ﬁdelity, enough simplicity, and
enough comprehensibility to satisfy most people.

Many of the high-level design decisions of UD can be motivated in terms of
these criteria. Making UD a monostratal theory—a theory with one representation (cf.
Ladusaw 1988)—facilitates easy annotation and parsing. The emphasis on grammati-
cal relations works well for both comparative linguistics and usage by non-linguists.
Preferring relations between content words rather than mediated by function words
increases crosslinguistic parallelism and within language parallelism (simple vs. pe-
riphrastic tenses become more parallel), and makes relation extraction easier (fewer,
smaller patterns will cover a broader range of data). For example, the construction of
predicating a property of a nominal (the sky is blue) is universal, while the strategy of
achieving this via an auxiliary or copula verb is not. We increase parallelism by having
a dependency between the nominal and the predicate. It also has the effect of more
perspicuously revealing predicate–argument structure to the beneﬁt of downstream
processing. By mainly adopting terminology from traditional (European) grammar, we
make it easier for non-expert users to comprehend UD representations, but we still make
some changes, such as using the term adposition, to make UD more satisfactory on
cross-linguistic grounds.

A key choice was between dependency representations and constituency represen-
tations (also known as phrase structure grammar, context-free grammar, or immediate
constituency representations). One motivation here was simply the direction of the ﬁeld
of computational linguistics. While the famous early treebanks of modern empirical
NLP, the Lancaster/IBM Treebank (Black, Garside, and Leech 1993) and the Penn Tree-
bank (Marcus, Santorini, and Marcinkiewicz 1993), and many treebanks that followed
thereafter were constituency treebanks, by the early 2000s, there had been a huge shift to
the use of dependency treebanks in computational linguistics. This was not altogether
a new thing. David Hayes, a founder of the Association for Computational Linguistics,
had strongly advocated for the use of Dependency Grammar in the 1960s (Hayes 1964).
And it was not a random shift: The adoption of a dependency representation was driven
by several of the ideas that underlie our design principles, such as simplicity, easy cross-
linguistic applicability, interpretability by non-linguists, and usefulness for downstream
applications.

Our goal was for UD to be a lightweight representation that is easy and satisfactory
for people to work with. It is gratifying to see that many people from disparate linguistic
and non-linguistic backgrounds have found UD congenial enough that they have felt
able and motivated to use it.

6. Conclusion and Outlook

In this article, we have articulated the linguistic theory underlying the UD framework.
After discussing basic theoretical assumptions (Section 2), we showed how the theory

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Volume 47, Number 2

applies to a wide range of linguistic constructions (Section 3), zoomed in on the treat-
ment of core arguments in a diverse sample of languages (Section 4), and concluded
by revisiting the design principles of UD (Section 5). We argued that UD provides a
good foundation for crosslinguistically consistent morphosyntactic annotation, which
can support research and application development in NLP, as well as typologically
oriented studies in linguistics. The UD resources have already had a signiﬁcant im-
pact on NLP research, most notably for multilingual dependency parsing through two
editions of CoNLL shared tasks (Zeman et al. 2017, 2018), which have created a new
generation of parsers that handle a large number of languages and that parse from raw
text rather than relying on pre-tokenized input. The resources have also been widely
used for research on cross-lingual and polyglot parsing, as well as universal semantic
parsing (see, e.g., Tiedemann 2015; Agi´c 2017; Kondratyuk and Straka 2019; Reddy et al.
2017), where the availability of resources with crosslinguistically consistent annota-
tion is crucial. Among more linguistically oriented studies, we ﬁnd research on psy-
cholinguistics and especially word order typology (see, e.g., Futrell, Mahowald, and
Gibson 2015; Naranjo and Becker 2018; Levshina 2019). For an overview of UD-related
research, we refer to the proceedings from the annual UD workshops (de Marneffe,
Nivre, and Schuster 2017; de Marneffe, Lynn, and Schuster 2018; Rademaker and Tyers
2019; de Marneffe et al. 2020).

Before we conclude, it is important to note that there are many details of the theory
that still need to be worked out. Even though all major construction types are covered
by the current version of the UD guidelines, there are many speciﬁc phenomena and
special cases that have not been discussed in sufﬁcient detail or received a deﬁnitive
treatment in UD. Moreover, the list of such phenomena constantly grows as new
languages are considered for analysis in the UD framework. Therefore, while we regard
the core of the UD theory as stable, we expect the theory as a whole to continue to
evolve over time, as a result of the ongoing dialogue between experts on different
languages trying to ﬁnd the right balance between language-speciﬁc and universal
perspectives in the application of UD to their language. We look forward to continuing
that dialogue and welcome everyone who is interested to take part in it.

Acknowledgments
Many people have contributed to the
development of UD, and we especially want
to mention our colleagues in the UD core
guidelines group, Filip Ginter, Yoav
Goldberg, Jan Hajiˇc, Ryan McDonald, Slav
Petrov, Sampo Pyysalo, Sebastian Schuster,
Natalia Silveira, Reut Tsarfaty, and Francis
Tyers, as well as William Croft, Kim
Gerdes, Sylvain Kahane, Nathan Schneider,
and Amir Zeldes. We are grateful to
Google for sponsoring the UD project in a
number of ways, and to the Computational
Linguistics reviewers for helpful
suggestions. Daniel Zeman’s and Joakim
Nivre’s contributions to this work were
supported by grant GX20-16819X of the
Czech Science Foundation and grant
2016-01817 of the Swedish Research
Council, respectively.

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