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# 20. Syntax overview

**On this page**

1. [1. Ukrainian syntax at a glance](#1-ukrainian-syntax-at-a-glance)
2. [2. Case carries the roles](#2-case-carries-the-roles)
3. [3. Agreement](#3-agreement)
4. [4. Clause order: free in grammar, fixed in meaning](#4-clause-order-free-in-grammar-fixed-in-meaning)
5. [5. Phrase order: close to fixed](#5-phrase-order-close-to-fixed)
6. [6. Words with a fixed place](#6-words-with-a-fixed-place)
7. [7. Information structure: a first look](#7-information-structure-a-first-look)
8. [8. Sentence types](#8-sentence-types)
9. [9. Ukrainian in Universal Dependencies](#9-ukrainian-in-universal-dependencies)
10. [10. Varieties and styles as deltas](#10-varieties-and-styles-as-deltas)
11. [11. Quick reference](#11-quick-reference)
12. [12. How Mova handles it](#12-how-mova-handles-it)
13. [13. Sources](#13-sources)

Ukrainian builds a clause round a finite verb (or a predicative word, or a nominal predicate), and it tells the roles of the participants mainly by **case endings** and **agreement**, not by position. The subject is in the nominative and agrees with the verb — in person and number in the present and future, in gender and number in the past; the direct object is in the accusative; the recipient in the dative; the instrument in the instrumental. Because the endings carry the roles, the order of the words in the clause is free to carry something else: what the sentence is about and what it says that is new. *Брат читає книжку* (*Brat chytaie knyzhku*) 'The brother is reading a book', *Книжку читає брат* 'It is the brother who is reading the book', *Читає брат книжку* 'The brother is reading a book (narrated, verb first)' have the same roles and different information structure. Inside the phrase, by contrast, the order is close to fixed: adjectives before the noun, genitives after it, prepositions before their noun. The subject may be left out when the verb's ending or the context names it, and many sentences have no subject at all (*Світає* 'Day is breaking', *Мені холодно* 'I am cold', *Рішення прийнято* 'The decision has been adopted').

This chapter gives the overall picture: cases as the carriers of roles, the freedom of clause order and the rigidity of phrase order (with counts from the two Ukrainian treebanks), the elements whose place is fixed (conjunctions, *не*, the particle *би*, the postfix *-ся*), the main sentence types, the way Universal Dependencies (UD) annotates Ukrainian, and how the varieties and styles change the basic picture. The detailed chapters follow: clause structure (21), phrases (22), complementation (23), coordination and subordination (24), relative clauses (25), questions (26), negation (27), voice (28), and word order and information structure in detail (29).

Contents

1. [Ukrainian syntax at a glance](#1-ukrainian-syntax-at-a-glance)
2. [Case carries the roles](#2-case-carries-the-roles)
3. [Agreement](#3-agreement)
4. [Clause order: free in grammar, fixed in meaning](#4-clause-order-free-in-grammar-fixed-in-meaning)
5. [Phrase order: close to fixed](#5-phrase-order-close-to-fixed)
6. [Words with a fixed place](#6-words-with-a-fixed-place)
7. [Information structure: a first look](#7-information-structure-a-first-look)
8. [Sentence types](#8-sentence-types)
9. [Ukrainian in Universal Dependencies](#9-ukrainian-in-universal-dependencies)
10. [Varieties and styles as deltas](#10-varieties-and-styles-as-deltas)
11. [Quick reference](#11-quick-reference)
12. [How Mova handles it](#12-how-mova-handles-it)
13. [Sources](#13-sources)

Related chapters: the cases and their endings in [11. Nouns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/); pronouns in [12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/12-pronouns-determiners-numerals/); verb forms in [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/13-verbs/); word order in detail in [29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/); the reference of dropped subjects in [35. Reference and coreference](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/35-reference-and-coreference/); the varieties in [8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/08-national-varieties/) and the styles in [37. Register and variation](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/37-register-and-variation/).

Conventions. Ukrainian examples are in Cyrillic italics; on first use a word or sentence is followed by its romanization in the Ukrainian national system (Cabinet of Ministers resolution No. 55 of 27 January 2010) and an English gloss. Counts are from UD 2.18 (UD_Ukrainian-IU and UD_Ukrainian-ParlaMint, all splits), made on 2026-11-06 with `awk` over the CoNLL-U files; "words" are syntactic words (lines with an integer ID). IU is under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and is used here for counts only; ParlaMint is CC BY-SA 4.0, and its sentences are quoted briefly with their `sent_id`. Other examples are constructed or come from public-domain authors (Shevchenko, folk songs) as cited in the public-domain grammars.

---

## 1. Ukrainian syntax at a glance

| feature | Ukrainian | English for contrast |
| --- | --- | --- |
| roles marked by | case endings, agreement, prepositions | position, prepositions |
| clause order | free; the unmarked order is SVO; the order expresses topic and focus | fixed SVO |
| phrase order | close to fixed: adjective + noun + genitive; preposition + noun | similar, with the *of*-phrase after |
| subject | may be omitted when recoverable; many sentences have none | required (dummy *it*, *there*) |
| copula in the present | none: *Він учитель* 'He [is] a teacher' | *is* |
| articles | none; definiteness by order, demonstratives, context | *a*, *the* |
| negation | *не* before the negated word; negative concord (*Ніхто нічого не бачив*) | *not* after the auxiliary; one negation |
| yes/no questions | intonation or *чи* at the start | inversion with an auxiliary |
| subordinate clauses | after the main clause or before it; introduced by conjunctions (*що*, *щоб*, *коли*, *якщо*) and relatives (*який*, *що*) | similar |
| non-finite clauses | infinitive (*-ти*), converb (*-учи*, *-вши*), participles (*-ний*, *-тий*, *-лий*) | infinitive, *-ing*, participles |

The traditional grammars describe the same core. Smal-Stotsky and Gartner (1913, § 62, *Wortstellung*) say that the order of words in Ukrainian is "free, but not indifferent": there is a normal order, from which one departs "for rhetorical or poetic reasons, to stress a word by an unusual position or to connect with what has been said by putting first the part of the new sentence that was mentioned before". Simovych (1919, § 340) notes that "since a sentence cannot be without a predicate, it can in our language do without a subject" and classifies the subjectless sentences (chapter 21). Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. XXIX) calls parataxis — the joining of words and clauses side by side, with or without conjunctions — "the greatest and most characteristic feature of the Ukrainian folk language" (chapter 24).

## 2. Case carries the roles

### 2.1 The seven cases in the clause

Ukrainian has seven cases (the endings are in [11. Nouns](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/11-nouns/)). Their main clause-level functions:

| case | Ukrainian name | main roles in the clause | example |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| nominative | називний | subject; nominal predicate; address in colloquial speech | *Брат читає.* 'The brother reads.' |
| genitive | родовий | possessor and complement of nouns; object of some verbs (*боятися*, *шукати*, *потребувати*); partitive object (*випити води* 'drink some water'); object under negation; existential negation (*Немає часу* 'There is no time'); after numerals five and up and after quantifiers; time (*минулої осені* 'last autumn') | *Він боїться темряви.* 'He is afraid of the dark.' |
| dative | давальний | recipient, beneficiary; experiencer of states (*Мені холодно*); object of some verbs (*допомагати*, *дякувати*); agent-like experiencer with infinitives (*Тобі йти* 'It is your turn to go') | *Я дав братові книжку.* 'I gave my brother a book.' |
| accusative | знахідний | direct object; object of *-но/-то* forms (*Хату збудовано* 'The house has been built'); duration and distance (*цілу ніч* 'all night') | *Сестра читає книжку.* |
| instrumental | орудний | instrument; predicate after *бути* in the past/future, *стати*, *вважатися* (*Він був учителем* 'He was a teacher'); object of *керувати*, *цікавитися*; agent of a passive (§ 9.3 and chapter 28); time and path (*вечорами* 'in the evenings', *лісом* 'through the forest') | *Він пише ручкою.* 'He writes with a pen.' |
| locative | місцевий | only with prepositions: place, topic | *у місті* 'in the town', *на столі* 'on the table' |
| vocative | кличний | address; outside the clause's structure | *Мамо, іди сюди!* 'Mum, come here!' |

### 2.2 Syncretism and the ambiguity it leaves

The endings do not always tell the roles apart. Inanimate masculine nouns and all neuter nouns have the same form in the nominative and the accusative; animate masculine nouns have an accusative equal to the genitive; feminine nouns of the *-а/-я* declension have a distinct accusative (*-у/-ю*). The result:

| sentence | subject and object | resolved by |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *Сестру побачив брат.* (*Sestru pobachyv brat*) 'It was the brother who saw the sister.' | *сестру* Acc, *брат* Nom | endings, and the past-tense gender (*побачив* is masculine) |
| *Доньку любить мати.* 'The mother loves her daughter.' | *доньку* Acc, *мати* Nom (the accusative would be *матір*) | endings |
| *Море бачить сонце.* | *море* and *сонце* are both Nom/Acc neuter | order: the first is the subject by default; context can reverse it |

When both nouns are ambiguous, the first noun is read as the subject; this is the rule which grammars give and the reason why SVO is the unmarked order (§ 4). Agreement helps where the noun does not: in the past tense the verb shows the gender of the subject (*Мати бачила сонце* 'The mother saw the sun' — feminine *бачила* agrees with *мати*, not with neuter *сонце*).

### 2.3 Government

Verbs, adjectives and prepositions **govern** the case of their dependents: *дякувати кому* (Dat) 'thank somebody', *керувати чим* (Ins) 'manage something', *боятися чого* (Gen) 'fear something', *гідний чого* (Gen) 'worthy of something', *біля* + Gen 'near', *у/в* + Loc 'in' or + Acc 'into', *з* + Gen 'from' or + Ins 'with'. Government is the subject of chapters 22 (phrases) and 23 (complementation). Many prepositions take two or three cases with different meanings, so the case of the noun, not the preposition alone, decides the meaning: *на столі* (Loc) 'on the table', *на стіл* (Acc) 'onto the table'.

## 3. Agreement

Agreement links the subject to the verb and the noun to its modifiers.

| link | features | example |
| --- | --- | --- |
| subject → verb, present and future | person, number | *я читаю*, *ти читаєш*, *вони читають* |
| subject → verb, past | gender (in the singular), number | *він читав*, *вона читала*, *воно читало*, *вони читали* |
| subject → nominal or adjectival predicate | gender, number (case: Nom, or Ins with a copula) | *Вона щаслива* 'She is happy'; *Він був щасливим* 'He was happy' |
| noun → adjective, determiner, participle | gender (sg), number, case; animacy in the accusative | *мого старого друга* (Acc = Gen, animate), *мій старий стіл* (Acc = Nom) |
| noun → numeral | case after *два/три/чотири* agreement; after *п'ять* and up, the numeral governs the genitive plural | chapter 22 |

The past tense comes from an old participle in *-л-*, which is why it agrees in gender and has no person (*я читав*, *ти читав*, *він читав*; with a woman speaker *я читала*). The person must therefore come from a pronoun or from context; this matters for the dropping of subjects (chapter 21 § 3, chapter 35). The polite *Ви* addressed to one person takes plural verbs and, in the standard, plural adjectival predicates (*Ви прийшли*, *Ви такі добрі*); a singular noun predicate keeps its own number and gender (*Ви наш гість*, *Ви були нашою гостею*). Address is treated in chapter 32.

## 4. Clause order: free in grammar, fixed in meaning

### 4.1 The six orders and their frequencies

All six orders of subject (S), verb (V) and object (O) are grammatical. The treebanks show how often each occurs when both subject and object are nouns or pronouns (clauses with a VERB head that has both an `nsubj` and an `obj` of category NOUN, PROPN or PRON; UD 2.18, all splits, 2026-11-06):

| order | IU (mixed written genres) | of which O is a pronoun | ParlaMint (parliamentary speech) | of which O is a pronoun |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| SVO | 1 426 (71.8%) | 159 | 1 173 (78.5%) | 68 |
| SOV | 178 (9.0%) | 124 | 137 (9.2%) | 101 |
| OVS | 158 (8.0%) | 66 | 83 (5.6%) | 39 |
| OSV | 135 (6.8%) | 52 | 79 (5.3%) | 41 |
| VOS | 56 (2.8%) | 21 | 13 (0.9%) | 2 |
| VSO | 34 (1.7%) | 3 | 9 (0.6%) | 3 |
| total | 1 987 |  | 1 494 |  |

Three facts stand out. SVO is the clear default (72–79%). SOV is almost always an order with a **pronoun object** before the verb (124 of 178 in IU, 101 of 137 in ParlaMint): *Я його бачив* 'I saw him' is as normal as *Я бачив його*; the unstressed pronoun gravitates towards the verb's left (§ 6.4). And the object-first orders (OVS, OSV) together make 11–15% of these clauses: object fronting is a normal device, not a poetic licence.

The position of a noun subject relative to the finite verb, counted over all finite verbs with a noun or proper-noun subject (`nsubj` or `nsubj:pass`):

| treebank | subject before the verb | subject after the verb | share after |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| IU | 2 592 | 1 266 | 32.8% |
| ParlaMint | 1 230 | 926 | 42.9% |

A third of noun subjects follow the verb in writing, more than two fifths in parliamentary speech. Much of the postverbal share is the existential and presentational type (*В залі зареєструвалося 288 народних депутатів*, ParlaMint-UA_2014-03-04-m0.u1.p2.lang1.s1, '288 deputies have registered in the hall'), where the subject is the new information.

### 4.2 The normal order and the departures from it

Smal-Stotsky and Gartner (1913, § 62) give the normal order and its regular departures; their rules still describe the written standard:

1. The subject with its attributes stands before the predicate, the object and the adverbials after it: *Колюмб відкрив Америку* (*Kolumb vidkryv Ameryku*) 'Columbus discovered America'.
2. Of two objects the dative precedes the accusative (*Напишу братові лист* 'I'll write my brother a letter'), and generally the shorter expression precedes the longer.
3. After an object or adverbial that begins the sentence, the verb usually precedes the subject: *В одному городі жив купець* 'In a certain town there lived a merchant'; always after quoted words: *«Чого тут треба?» — спитав капрал* '"What is wanted here?" asked the corporal'.
4. Unstressed personal and reflexive pronouns attach to the first words of the clause (conjunctions, question words): *Як собі хто постелить, так і виспиться* 'As you make your bed, so you will sleep'.
5. In narrative the verb is very often first: *Шуміла вода по камінню, цвірінькали воробці в лозах* 'The water roared over the stones, the sparrows chirped in the willows'.

The departures have functions:

| order | example | function |
| --- | --- | --- |
| S V O | *Брат читає книжку.* | neutral; all-new or topic = subject |
| O V S | *Книжку читає брат.* | the object is the topic (given), the subject is the focus: 'The book, it's the brother who is reading it' |
| O S V | *Книжку брат читає (а газету — ні).* | contrastive topic: 'the book, the brother is reading (but not the paper)' |
| V S O | *Читає брат книжку.* | narrative or presentational; the event itself is in view |
| S O V | *Брат книжку читає.* | object given or contrasted; the verb is the focus ('the brother is *reading* the book, not writing it') |
| adverbial V S | *Учора приїхав батько.* | scene-setting adverbial + new subject |

The examples above all contain the same three words and keep the same roles; only the sentence's "packaging" differs. ParlaMint has natural instances of OVS with a long postverbal subject: *Але ж сьогодні рішення в Криму приймає військове керівництво Російської Федерації* (ParlaMint-UA_2014-03-04-m0.u116.p2.lang1.s1) 'But today it is the military leadership of the Russian Federation that is taking the decisions in Crimea'; and object fronting for emphasis: *Такої тривоги, такого неспокою не мала наша незалежна держава ніколи* (ParlaMint-UA_2014-03-04-m0.u4.p1.lang1.s2) 'Such alarm, such unrest our independent state has never had' (the genitive objects of a negated verb fronted and the adverb *ніколи* moved to the end for weight).

### 4.3 Order and the spoken sentence

Free order goes with sentence stress. The neutral stress falls on the last stressed word, which is why the new information goes last. A speaker can put the stress elsewhere and keep the neutral order: *Брат читає книжку* with stress on *брат* has the same meaning as *Книжку читає брат*. Written texts, which cannot show the stress, use the order; speech uses both. Chapter 29 treats the details (topic, contrast, focus particles, the place of the verb, heavy constituents).

## 5. Phrase order: close to fixed

Inside the noun phrase and the prepositional phrase the order is far less free than in the clause. The counts (dependent before or after its head; UD 2.18, all splits, 2026-11-06):

| relation | example | IU before / after | % before | ParlaMint before / after | % before |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `amod` adjective | *стара хата* | 9 282 / 464 | 95.2 | 8 806 / 438 | 95.3 |
| `det` determiner | *ця хата*, *моя хата* | 3 112 / 91 | 97.2 | 3 096 / 87 | 97.3 |
| `nummod` agreeing numeral | *три хати* | 498 / 11 | 97.8 | 361 / 59 | 86.0 |
| `nummod:gov` governing numeral | *п'ять хат* | 500 / 22 | 95.8 | 346 / 1 | 99.7 |
| `det:numgov` quantifier | *багато хат* | 144 / 2 | 98.6 | 51 / 0 | 100 |
| `nmod` in the genitive | *хата батька* | 82 / 7 491 | 1.1 | 56 / 8 734 | 0.6 |
| `nmod` other cases | *хата з садком* | 50 / 1 893 | 2.6 | 67 / 2 173 | 3.0 |
| `acl` participle or infinitive clause | *хата, збудована дідом* | 7 / 449 | 1.5 | 2 / 770 | 0.3 |
| `acl:relcl` relative clause | *хата, яку збудував дід* | 5 / 1 151 | 0.4 | 0 / 1 170 | 0 |
| `advmod` adverb (all heads) | *дуже добре*, *швидко біжить* | 5 635 / 918 | 86.0 | 3 387 / 668 | 83.5 |
| `obl` oblique (clause level, for contrast) | *у місті жив*, *жив у місті* | 2 971 / 5 659 | 34.4 | 2 006 / 3 276 | 38.0 |
| `iobj` indirect object (for contrast) |  | 122 / 224 | 35.3 | 285 / 492 | 36.7 |

The noun phrase is head-medial and rigid: modifiers that agree with the noun (adjectives, determiners, agreeing numerals) come before it in 95–98% of cases; modifiers that do not agree (genitives, prepositional phrases, clauses) come after it in 97–100%. Clause-level dependents (`obl`, `iobj`) are spread on both sides of the verb. The two treebanks agree to within a point or two on the noun phrase, which shows that the rigidity is a property of the language, not of a genre.

The 5% of postposed adjectives belong to identifiable types:

- **folk and poetic style**: *Реве та стогне Дніпр широкий* (Shevchenko) 'The wide Dnipro roars and moans'; *Садок вишневий коло хати* (Shevchenko) 'A cherry orchard by the house'; *козаче молодий* 'young Cossack' in songs; this postposition is a mark of the song and of the folk-poetic style (§ 10, chapter 37);
- **terms and classifications**, where the noun names the class: *кислота сірчана* in lists, *рік минулий* in official dates — in the standard such orders are rare and mostly in catalogues;
- **address and emotional expressions**: *мамо рідна*, *друже мій*, *Боже милий*;
- adjectives with their own complements: *людина, гідна поваги* 'a person worthy of respect' (an `amod` with a dependent, usually after a comma);
- **heavy or contrastive attributes**: *Він купив хату — нову, світлу* 'He bought a house — new, bright'.

## 6. Words with a fixed place

Some words have a fixed position whatever the order of the rest.

### 6.1 Conjunctions, relative and question words

Conjunctions, relative words and question words stand at the beginning of their clause (Smal-Stotsky and Gartner 1913, § 62.1): *Я знаю, що він прийде* 'I know that he will come'; *хата, яку він збудував* 'the house that he built'; *Де ти був?* 'Where were you?'. The exceptions are the particle-like conjunctions *же/ж* and *бо* in their emphatic use, and the conjunction *ж* placed after the first word (*Ти ж знаєш* 'But you know').

### 6.2 The negation *не*

*Не* stands immediately before the word it negates, and before the predicate when the whole clause is negated (Smal-Stotsky and Gartner 1913, § 62.3): *Ти обманив не людей, а Бога* 'You deceived not people but God'; *Він не прийшов* 'He did not come'. With a compound predicate *не* goes before the finite part: *Я не можу прийти* 'I cannot come'. Negative pronouns require *не* on the verb: *Ніхто нічого не бачив* 'Nobody saw anything' (chapter 27).

### 6.3 The particle *би/б*

The conditional particle *би* (after a consonant) or *б* (after a vowel), written separately (Український правопис 2019, § 117), is mobile: it follows the verb or the first stressed word of the clause, often a conjunction or a pronoun. *Я прийшов би* / *Я б прийшов* 'I would come'; *Якби ти знав…* 'If you knew…' (*би* fused into *якби*); *Хто б міг подумати!* 'Who would have thought!'. In ParlaMint the position after the subject pronoun and before the verb is frequent: *Я би хотів звернути увагу вашу на наступне* (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u137.p3.lang1.s1) 'I would like to draw your attention to the following'. The rule of *б* after a vowel and *би* after a consonant is not always followed in transcripts (*Я би хотів* has *би* after the vowel *я*); the orthography's rule is a spelling rule of euphony, and speakers vary.

### 6.4 Unstressed pronouns and the postfix *-ся*

Unstressed object pronouns tend to precede the verb or to follow the first word of the clause, as § 4.1 showed (SOV with pronoun objects). In the standard the reflexive *-ся* is a postfix written together with the verb (*сміється*, *вмився*); in the south-western dialects and in older Galician writing it is a **mobile clitic** that can stand before the verb, after the first word of the clause: *як ся маєш?* 'how are you?', which survives as a set phrase all over Ukraine, and dialectal *Я ся не бою* 'I am not afraid'. Smal-Stotsky and Gartner, who wrote in Galicia, give the proverb *Як собі хто постелить, так ся і виспить* with the clitic *ся* after *так* (§ 62.4). This is one of the dialect deltas of § 10.

## 7. Information structure: a first look

The Ukrainian tradition calls the division of the sentence into what it is about and what it says about it **актуальне членування** ('actual division'): the **тема** (theme, topic: the given starting point) and the **рема** (rheme, focus: the new message). In a neutral sentence the theme comes first and the rheme last; free order is the means.

| question (context) | answer | theme | rheme |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| *Що робить брат?* 'What is the brother doing?' | *Брат читає книжку.* | *брат* | *читає книжку* |
| *Хто читає книжку?* 'Who is reading the book?' | *Книжку читає брат.* | *книжку читає* | *брат* |
| *Що читає брат?* 'What is the brother reading?' | *Брат читає книжку.* (stress on *книжку*) | *брат читає* | *книжку* |
| *Що сталося?* 'What happened?' | *Приїхав брат.* | — (all new) | *приїхав брат* |

Ukrainian has no articles, and order does part of their work: a noun at the start of the clause tends to be read as definite (given), a noun at the end as indefinite (new). *Дівчинка вийшла з хати* 'The girl came out of the house'; *З хати вийшла дівчинка* 'A girl came out of the house'. This is a tendency, not a rule: demonstratives (*ця дівчинка*), indefinites (*якась дівчинка*, *одна дівчинка* 'a certain girl') and context decide when order does not.

Other means of information structure, treated in chapter 29:

- **focus particles**: *навіть* 'even', *тільки*, *лише* 'only', *саме* 'precisely', *і* 'also, even', *ж/же* (emphasis): *Саме брат читає книжку* 'It is precisely the brother who is reading the book';
- **the demonstrative-pronoun cleft**: *Це брат читає книжку* 'It's the brother who is reading the book' (the particle *це*; in `kg` it is recognised as a particle, § 12);
- **dislocation** with a resumptive pronoun, mostly in speech: *Брат, він завжди читає* 'My brother, he always reads'; UD `dislocated` occurs 19 times in IU and 49 in ParlaMint;
- **intonation and stress**.

## 8. Sentence types

### 8.1 By structure

| type | Ukrainian term | example |
| --- | --- | --- |
| simple, two-member (subject + predicate) | просте двоскладне | *Брат читає.* |
| simple, one-member: the predicate alone | односкладне | *Світає.* 'Day is breaking.' *Мені холодно.* *Рішення прийнято.* *Пишу листа.* 'I'm writing a letter.' |
| simple, one-member: a noun alone (nominative sentence) | називне | *Ніч.* 'Night.' *Тиша.* 'Silence.' |
| incomplete (elliptical) | неповне | *— Хто прийшов? — Брат.* |
| compound (coordinated clauses) | складносурядне | *Брат читає, а сестра пише.* |
| complex (main + subordinate clause) | складнопідрядне | *Брат читає, бо завтра іспит.* |
| asyndetic complex (clauses without conjunction) | безсполучникове | *Прийшла весна — розцвіли сади.* 'Spring came — the orchards blossomed.' |

The one-member types are described in chapter 21 § 5; coordination and subordination in chapter 24; ellipsis in chapter 29.

### 8.2 By purpose

Declarative, interrogative (with *чи* or by intonation; chapter 26), imperative (chapter 31) and optative (*Щоб ти здоров був!* 'May you be healthy!'; *Хай щастить!* 'Good luck!'), each of which may be exclamatory.

## 9. Ukrainian in Universal Dependencies

### 9.1 The two treebanks

| treebank (UD 2.18) | content | sentences | words | words without punctuation | licence | use here |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| UD_Ukrainian-IU | fiction, news, opinion, Wikipedia, legal texts, letters, posts and comments; the last fifteen years and the first half of the 20th century | 7 092 | 122 750 | 99 495 | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 | counts only |
| UD_Ukrainian-ParlaMint | transcripts of Verkhovna Rada plenary sessions 2003–2022 and one National Security and Defence Council meeting (2014) | 7 142 | 109 166 | 89 858 | CC BY-SA 4.0 | counts, short quotes |

ParlaMint was built on the IU annotation scheme with manual correction, its morphology from the VESUM dictionary (shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian). Its authors chose transcripts from 2003–2022 because earlier transcripts show grammatical editing and later ones the normalising effect of speech recognition (which, for instance, replaces vernacular *щас* with *зараз* 'now'); they removed Ukrainian–Russian code switching and Russian sentences. The treebank therefore records edited spontaneous public speech, with colloquial syntax kept. The same paper reports that the vocative and the nominative compete in address in the Rada's transcripts, with the proportion varying strongly by word, although the norm (Український правопис 2019) recommends the vocative only: the short ParlaMint openers show both, *Дякую, пане Голово* 'Thank you, Mr Chairman' with vocatives, and *Дякую, Тарас Іванович* (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u93.p1.lang1.s1) with the nominative (chapters 32 and 37).

### 9.2 The relations, and what is special in Ukrainian

Relation counts (all splits; `punct` and `root` included):

| relation | IU | ParlaMint | Ukrainian use |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `nsubj` | 7 722 | 6 875 | subject |
| `obj` | 5 712 | 4 583 | direct object (IU also uses it for a sole dative or genitive object, § 9.3) |
| `iobj` | 346 | 777 | second object, usually dative |
| `obl` / `obl:arg` | 8 630 / — | 5 282 / 435 | obliques; ParlaMint marks argument obliques (*переходити до чого*, *голосувати за що*) |
| `obl:agent` | — | 154 | the agent of a passive in the instrumental |
| `nummod` / `nummod:gov` | 509 / 522 | 420 / 347 | agreeing numeral / numeral governing the genitive (chapter 22) |
| `det:numgov` / `det:nummod` | 146 / 35 | 51 / 13 | quantifier governing the genitive (*багато*, *кілька*) / agreeing |
| `xcomp` / `xcomp:pred` | 1 033 / 336 | 1 741 / 3 | infinitive complement / secondary predicate (*стати вчителем*; ParlaMint uses plain `xcomp` for most of these) |
| `cop` | 803 | 526 | copula *бути* in past, future, infinitive and the rare present *є* |
| `expl` | 116 | 135 | *це*, *то* as correlates |
| `vocative` | 101 | 759 | address (parliamentary speech is rich in it) |
| `discourse` / `parataxis:discourse` | 2 321 / 226 | 791 / 1 | particles and discourse words |
| `advmod:neg` | — | 1 198 | *не* (IU labels it `advmod` with `Polarity=Neg`) |
| `advmod:emph` | — | 217 | emphatic particles (*навіть*, *тільки*) |
| `flat:title` | 1 070 | 11 | titles (*газета «День»*) |
| `dislocated` | 19 | 49 | dislocated topic |
| `reparandum` | 1 | 91 | repaired words in speech |
| `orphan` | 256 | 582 | ellipsis remnants |

Three features of the Ukrainian annotation are used throughout this manual.

- **Impersonal *-но/-то* forms** are `VERB` with `VerbForm=Fin|Mood=Ind|Person=0` (*Рішення прийнято*, ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u120.p6.lang1.s1); there are 197 such verbs in IU and 302 in ParlaMint (chapters 21 and 28).
- **Predicative words** (*треба*, *можна*, *слід*, *потрібно*, *необхідно*, *видно*) are `ADV` heads of their clause, with the infinitive as `csubj` (382 infinitive `csubj` under an ADV head in IU, 423 in ParlaMint).
- **Numerals and quantifiers** that govern the genitive have their own subtypes (`nummod:gov`, `det:numgov`), and the noun is the head of the phrase (chapter 22).

### 9.3 Where the two treebanks differ

The two treebanks follow the same guidelines but differ on several points, which matters when counts from both are compared:

| point | IU | ParlaMint |
| --- | --- | --- |
| a sole dative or genitive object | often `obj` (517 dative and 834 genitive among 5 448 nominal `obj`; heads such as *казати*, *подобатися*, *мати*, *немати*) | `iobj` for the dative (743), `obj` for the genitive (415 of 4 377 nominal `obj`: negated verbs, partitives, *просити*, *потребувати*, *вимагати*) |
| argument obliques | `obl` | `obl:arg` (435) |
| *не* | `advmod` | `advmod:neg` |
| secondary predicates | `xcomp:pred` (336) | mostly `xcomp` |
| instrumental agent | `obl` | `obl:agent` (154) |

## 10. Varieties and styles as deltas

The literary standard is the reference; each variety and style is described here by what it changes in the syntax of this chapter. Details are in chapters 08 and 37.

| variety or style | grammar delta (syntax of this chapter) | lexicon delta | orthography / pronunciation delta |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| colloquial standard | more subject drop; more dislocation (*Брат, він…*); verb-first narrative; the nominative in address next to the vocative; more parataxis, fewer subordinators | discourse particles (*ну*, *от*, *ж*, *бо*) in clause-internal positions | *шо* for *що* in the east and south |
| official, legal | longer noun phrases with stacked genitives (*прийняття рішення щодо забезпечення…*); impersonal *-но/-то*; instrumental agents (*ухвалено Верховною Радою*); fewer subject pronouns; SVO | verbal nouns in *-ння*, *-ття*; compound prepositions (*відповідно до*, *у разі*) | — |
| folk song, folk-poetic | postposed adjectives (*Дніпр широкий*, *садок вишневий*); vocatives with postposed adjective (*козаче молодий*); verb-first lines; repetition and parallelism; free fronting for metre and rhyme | diminutives, fixed epithets (*зелений гай*, *чорні брови*) | short adjective forms (*зелен*, *повен*), metre-driven stress |
| south-western dialects | mobile *ся* before the verb and after the first word (*я ся не бою*); past tense with person clitics (*спав-єм* 'I slept'); more subject drop in the past (fellerer-2022-pro-drop-sw) | regional words | regional phonetics |
| surzhyk | clause order and case system Ukrainian; some Russian government patterns (*по ділу* for *у справі*, *згідно чого* for *згідно з чим*); see chapter 37 | Russian lexical items with Ukrainian grammar | Russian unstressed *о*, infinitive in *-ть* (also an oral variant in the standard, chapter 23) |

## 11. Quick reference

| construction | example | UD analysis |
| --- | --- | --- |
| neutral SVO | *Брат читає книжку.* | `nsubj(читає, Брат)`, `obj(читає, книжку)` |
| fronted object | *Книжку читає брат.* | same relations; order differs |
| pronoun object before verb | *Я його бачив.* | `obj(бачив, його)` |
| verbless predicate | *Він учитель.* | `nsubj(учитель, Він)`; no `cop` |
| copula in the past | *Він був учителем.* | `cop(учителем, був)`, `nsubj(учителем, Він)`; *учителем* `Case=Ins` |
| impersonal *-но/-то* | *Рішення прийнято.* | root *прийнято* `Person=0`; *Рішення* `obj` (Acc) |
| predicative + infinitive | *Треба йти.* | root *Треба* ADV, `csubj(Треба, йти)` |
| agreeing numeral | *три книжки* | `nummod(книжки, три)` |
| governing numeral | *п'ять книжок* | `nummod:gov(книжок, п'ять)` |
| negation | *не прийшов* | `advmod` (IU) / `advmod:neg` (ParlaMint)(*прийшов*, *не*) |
| conditional particle | *Я б прийшов.* | `aux(прийшов, б)` AUX `Mood=Cnd` |
| vocative | *Мамо, іди!* | `vocative(іди, Мамо)` `Case=Voc` |

## 12. How Mova handles it

Mova has no Ukrainian dependency parser. There is no Ukrainian model in the multilingual dispatcher `tools/mova-parse` (its level 1, `langseg`, segments only Latin-script languages), and [What every language gets](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/PACKAGE/) has no Ukrainian UD baseline on 2026-11-06. What Mova has is the rule-based **simple-sentence fact extractor** of the knowledge graph, `kg/src/uk.rs`, with VESUM morphology (`kg/src/morph.rs`), a 4-byte grammar per word form (`kg/src/gram.rs`) and a generator back to text (`kg/src/textgen.rs`); see [kg — the Mova knowledge graph](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/). It produces one **fact** per simple sentence: a predicate and members (`subject`, `object:<case>`, `adverbial:<prep>+<case>`, `predicate:nominal`, `predicate:infinitive`, `quantity:<word>`, `attribute:…`, `particle`), with roles derived from case, agreement and government.

### 12.1 How it reads roles

- **By case and agreement, not by position.** The subject is the free nominative noun or pronoun that agrees with the predicate (`fn agrees`: person and number in the present and future, gender and number in the past); objects are the remaining nouns, in the case the verb governs (`fn governs`, using VESUM `rv_*` government marks where VESUM has them), tried in the order Acc, Dat, Ins, Gen.
- **Ambiguity by position.** When two nominatives both agree, the extractor takes the one that is the only unambiguous nominative, else the only candidate before the verb; otherwise it rejects the sentence as `ambiguous`. This is the "first noun is the subject" rule of § 2.2.
- **Attributes** are adjectives that agree with a noun (`fn adj_agrees`: case, number, gender in the singular, animacy in the accusative); a non-pronominal genitive right after a noun is its attribute. These are the phrase-order rules of § 5.
- **Order is not kept.** A fact has no word order; the generator re-creates an order by a Markov chain over chunk classes trained on parsed sentences (`textgen.rs`), so *Книжку читає брат* comes back in the most frequent order, losing the information structure of § 7.

### 12.2 Measured (kg at the worktree's commit, CPU, 2026-11-06)

All test sentences of chapters 20–24 were run once through `kg parse`; 25 of 49 were parsed. For this chapter:

| sentence | kg output | right? |
| --- | --- | --- |
| *Брат читає книжку.* | subject *брат* (Nom), object *книжка* (Acc) | yes |
| *Книжку читає брат.* | same | yes — the roles survive the order |
| *Читає брат книжку.* | same | yes |
| *Брат книжку читає.* | same | yes |
| *Сестру побачив брат.* | subject *брат*, object *сестра* (Acc); past masculine | yes |
| *Дочка любить матір.* | subject *дочка*, object *мати* (Acc) | yes |
| *Доньку любить мати.* | predicate *любити* + `predicate:infinitive` *мати* 'to have', implicit subject | **no** — *мати* 'mother' was read as the infinitive *мати* 'to have' after *любити*, which is on the modal list |
| *Море бачить сонце.* | subject *море*, object *сонце* | the default reading; the ambiguity is not flagged |

### 12.3 Not yet

- No dependency parser and no UD output for Ukrainian; no Ukrainian model for `tools/mova-parse`, and no Cyrillic in `langseg`.
- Only simple sentences up to eight words, without commas, conjunctions or digits (`kg/src/uk.rs`, the gates of `fn parse`); compound and complex sentences (chapter 24) are rejected.
- No information structure: the fact keeps no order and no topic or focus; the cleft particle *це* is recognised only as `particle`.
- Homonymy between parts of speech (*мати* 'mother' / 'to have') is resolved by the first rule that fits, not by context.
- The pragmatic labels of `prag/` read English only.

## 13. Sources

- Smal-Stotsky, Stepan and Theodor Gartner. 1913. *Grammatik der ruthenischen (ukrainischen) Sprache*. Wien: Ševčenko-Gesellschaft. § 62, *Wortstellung*. `stockyj-1913-ruthenische-grammatik` (public domain)
- Simovych, Vasyl. 1919. *Граматика української мови для самонавчання та в допомогу шкільній науці*. § 340 (subjectless sentences). `simovych-1919-hramatyka-ukrainskoi-movy-dlia` (public domain)
- Smerechynskyi, Serhii. 1932. *Нариси з української синтакси (у зв'язку з фразеологією та стилістикою)*. Kharkiv. Ch. XXIX (parataxis). `smerechynskyi-1932-narysy-z-ukrainskoi-syntaksy` (public domain in UA/EU)
- *Український правопис*. 2019. § 117 (the particle *би/б*). `ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019` (official text, not under copyright)
- Shvedova, Maria, Arsenii Lukashevskyi and Andriy Rysin. 2025. Developing a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Ukrainian Parliamentary Speech. UNLP 2025. `shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian` (CC BY 4.0)
- Fellerer, Jan. 2022. Subject pro-drop and past-tense auxiliary clitics in South-Western Ukrainian. *Russian Linguistics* 46(3). `fellerer-2022-pro-drop-sw` (CC BY 4.0)
- Universal Dependencies 2.18: UD_Ukrainian-IU (Kotsyba, Moskalevskyi et al.; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, counts only), UD_Ukrainian-ParlaMint (Shvedova, Lukashevskyi; CC BY-SA 4.0; sentences cited by `sent_id`). Counted on 2026-11-06 from UD_Ukrainian-*, all splits.
- Shevchenko, Taras: *Реве та стогне Дніпр широкий*, *Садок вишневий коло хати* (public domain).
- Mova: `kg/src/uk.rs`, `kg/src/morph.rs`, `kg/src/gram.rs`, `kg/src/textgen.rs`, [kg — the Mova knowledge graph](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/kg/), [mova-parse](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/tools/mova-parse/), [What every language gets](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/PACKAGE/).
- [← previous 19. The lexicon: where the words come from, multiword expressions and register](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/19-lexicon-mwe-register/)
- [next → 21. Clause structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/21-clause-structure/)
- [↑ back to Ukrainian: a reference manual for Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/)