🗣️ 20. Syntax overview

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
2. Case carries the roles
3. Agreement
4. Clause order: free in grammar, fixed in meaning
5. Phrase order: close to fixed
6. Words with a fixed place
7. Information structure: a first look
8. Sentence types
9. Ukrainian in Universal Dependencies
10. Varieties and styles as deltas
11. Quick reference
12. How Mova handles it
13. Sources

Related chapters: the cases and their endings in 11. Nouns; pronouns in 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals; verb forms in 13. Verbs; word order in detail in 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure; the reference of dropped subjects in 35. Reference and coreference; the varieties in 8. Regional varieties, diaspora and surzhyk and the styles in 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

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). Their main clause-level functions:

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:

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.

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):

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):

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:

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):

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.

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

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

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):

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:

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.

11. Quick reference

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 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. 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:

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, mova-parse, What every language gets.

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