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While the mechanisms for conveying temporal information in language have been have been extensively studied by linguists, very little of this work has been done in the tradition of corpus linguistics. In this paper we discuss the outcomes of a research effort to build a corpus, called TIMEBANK, which is richly annotated to indicate events, times, and temporal relations. We describe the annotation scheme, the corpus sources and tools used in the annotation process, and then report some preliminary figures about the distribution of various phenomena across the corpus. TIMEBANK represents the most fine-grained and extensively temporally annotated corpus to date, and will be a valuable resource both for corpus linguists interested in time and language, and for language engineers interested in applications such as question answering and information extraction for which accurate knowledge of the position and ordering of events in time is of key importance.