This volume gathers outlines of specialized corpus annotations for research into grammar and discourse from three different languages of Southeast Asia. The annotations implemented here follow the GRAID (‘Grammatical Relations and Animacy in Discourse’; Haig and Schnell 2014) conventions. The papers document the implementation of these conventions in individual languages, which are to be included in the publication of the respective corpora in Haig and Schnell’s (2015) Multi-CAST collection (‘Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts’, archived at the Language Archive Cologne). The three corpora have been annotated by the authors jointly with Stefan Schnell over the last year as part of a collaboration between the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language and the ILCAA-based project A collaborative network for usage-based research on lesser-studied languages. In this introduction we provide an outline of the principles of GRAID annotations and their purpose in research on discourse and grammar.