In this work, we summarize an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of three dependency schemes for English, in order to acquire and document contrastive insights into how these schemes relate to each other. We demon- strate how a simple quantitative method can reveal salient structural properties of individual schemes, as well as uncover systematic correspondences between pairs of schemes. We use this method to estimate and compare the expressiveness of three dependency schemes and we identifiy several linguistic phenomena that have a different syntactic analysis in two of these schemes.