🗣️ 22. Phrases

A Ukrainian phrase is built round a head that fixes the case, gender and number of its dependents. In the noun phrase the agreeing words — adjectives, determiners, possessives, ordinal and the lower cardinal numerals — come before the noun and copy its gender, number and case; the non-agreeing ones — genitives, prepositional phrases, clauses — come after it: мій старий друг із дитинства (mii staryi druh iz dytynstva) 'my old friend from childhood'. In the prepositional phrase the preposition chooses the case: у місті 'in the town' (locative), у місто 'into the town' (accusative). Numeral phrases split the language in two: два, три, чотири behave like adjectives and take a nominative plural noun (три книжки 'three books'), while п'ять and above behave like nouns in the nominative and accusative and take a genitive plural (п'ять книжок 'five books') but agree like adjectives in the other cases (з п'ятьма книжками 'with five books'). The indefinite quantifiers (багато, кілька, мало) take the genitive like п'ять. The adjective phrase has complements in the case the adjective governs (гідний поваги 'worthy of respect'), and comparison uses за + accusative, від + genitive or ніж + a nominative (старший за брата, старший від брата, старший, ніж брат 'older than the brother').

Contents

1. The noun phrase: order and agreement
2. Determiners, possessives and the possessive adjective
3. Complements and modifiers after the noun
4. Numeral and quantifier phrases
5. Prepositional phrases and case government
6. Adjective phrases
7. Comparison
8. Adverb phrases
9. Varieties and styles as deltas
10. Quick reference: phrases in UD
11. How Mova handles it
12. Sources

Related chapters: noun and adjective declension in 11. Nouns and 15. Adjectives and adverbs; numerals and pronouns in 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals; the order counts in 20. Syntax overview § 5; agreement of the verb with numeral subjects in 21. Clause structure § 2.4; verb government in 23. Complementation; relative clauses in 25. Relative clauses.

Conventions as in chapter 20. Counts: UD 2.18 (IU, counts only; ParlaMint, quoted by sent_id), all splits, awk, 2026-11-06.

1. The noun phrase: order and agreement

1.1 The template

The counts of chapter 20 § 5 show how firm this is: in both treebanks 95% of adjectives, 97% of determiners and 96–100% of governing numerals and quantifiers precede the noun, and 99% of genitive modifiers and all relative clauses follow it (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06). Several adjectives are ordered from the more subjective to the more classifying, as in English: гарна стара дерев'яна хата 'a pretty old wooden house'; a relative adjective that forms a term with the noun stands next to it (нова залізнична станція 'a new railway station').

1.2 Agreement inside the phrase

Every agreeing word copies the noun's case and number, and in the singular its gender; in the accusative it also copies animacy (masculine animate singulars and all animate plurals have an accusative equal to the genitive):

1.3 Mixed agreement

• Masculine nouns of the -а/-я declension (суддя 'judge', староста 'elder', Микола) take masculine agreement: наш суддя, старий Микола; nouns of common gender (сирота 'orphan', нероба 'idler') agree with the person's sex: бідний сирота / бідна сирота.
• Masculine titles applied to women. With a masculine noun naming a woman (лікар, директор, професор), the adjective is masculine (наш новий директор), the past verb follows the sex (Директор сказала), and the colloquial feminine adjective (наша директор) is non-standard. Current usage prefers the feminine noun itself: директорка, лікарка, професорка, авторка, which the 2019 orthography forms with the suffixes -к-, -иц-(я), -ин-(я), -ес- (§ 32.4), and whose coverage in dictionaries and in the GRAC corpus is documented by Synchak and Starko (2022, synchak-2022-feminine-dictionaries), who compiled a web dictionary of feminine personal nouns from corpus data. Here usage leads: the feminitives were in wide use before they were codified, and they continue to grow (chapter 37).
• The polite Ви takes a plural adjective (Ви такі добрі), a noun predicate keeps its own number (chapter 21 § 2).
• Pluralia tantum (двері 'door', ножиці 'scissors', гроші 'money') take plural agreement and collective numerals (§ 4.3).

1.4 Apposition

A noun in apposition agrees in case with its head: місто Київ, у місті Києві (both locative), з річкою Дніпром; with names of newspapers, ships, firms in quotation marks the name stays in the nominative: у газеті «День» 'in the newspaper Den'. UD marks the quoted titles as flat:title (1 070 in IU). The appositive name of a town also commonly stays uninflected in speech and journalism (у місті Київ), which the norm does not accept.

2. Determiners, possessives and the possessive adjective

2.1 Determiners

Ukrainian has no articles; definiteness is expressed by order (chapter 20 § 7), by demonstratives (цей 'this', той 'that', такий 'such'), by possessives and by indefinites (якийсь 'some', один 'a certain', будь-який 'any', кожен/кожний 'each', всякий, жоден 'no'). UD tags them DET and attaches them as det (3 203 in IU, 3 183 in ParlaMint); 97% precede the noun.

2.2 Possessives

The possessive pronouns мій, твій, свій, наш, ваш, and його, її, їхній/їх agree with the noun (except the invariable його, її, їх). The reflexive свій refers to the subject of its clause: Він узяв свою книжку 'He took his (own) book', against Він узяв його книжку 'He took his (someone else's) book' (chapter 35).

2.3 The possessive adjective

Ukrainian forms possessive adjectives from nouns naming persons and animals: батьків 'father's', мамин 'mother's', сестрин 'sister's', Шевченків 'Shevchenko's', Іванові діти 'Ivan's children'. Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. VIII) argued that the possessive genitive is "not proper to the folk language" in place of these adjectives, and recommended батькова хата over хата батька, Шевченкові твори over твори Шевченка, and adjectives also for the subjective and objective genitive (материна любов 'mother's love'). The modern standard has both: the possessive adjective is the natural choice for a single person in everyday and literary style (мамина сукня, братова машина), the genitive for persons with modifiers or full names, for institutions and in official style (твори Тараса Шевченка, рішення Кабінету Міністрів). The adjective is impossible when the possessor has its own modifiers (хата мого старого батька, not *мого старого батькова хата).

3. Complements and modifiers after the noun

The genitive is by far the commonest noun modifier: nmod in the genitive accounts for 7 573 of 9 516 nmod in IU (80%) and 8 790 of 11 030 in ParlaMint (80%) (2026-11-06). Genitive chains are characteristic of official style: забезпечення виконання рішення Кабінету Міністрів України 'ensuring the implementation of the decision of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine' — five nouns, four genitives. Smerechynskyi (ch. XVIII, XXI) and the style manuals since have criticised the stacking of verbal nouns in -ння as a feature of the bureaucratic style and recommended finite verbs (щоб виконати рішення); the stacking remains normal in legal and parliamentary language.

The partitive genitive after nouns of measure: склянка води 'a glass of water', кілограм цукру 'a kilo of sugar', шматок хліба 'a piece of bread'. The genitive of time is adverbial, not a noun modifier: минулої осені 'last autumn', того ж дня 'that same day' (Smerechynskyi ch. VI); in a dependency tree it is an obl of the verb.

4. Numeral and quantifier phrases

4.1 The four classes of cardinals

The 2019 orthography gives the paradigms, with the double forms of the oblique cases (п'ятдесяти / п'ятдесятьох, п'ятдесятьма / п'ятдесятьома) and the accusative п'ятдесят or п'ятдесятьох (§ 105). A compound numeral follows its last element: двадцять один студент (singular), двадцять два студенти, двадцять п'ять студентів; Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. XI.10) notes that after a compound ending in один the noun is singular (двадцять один рік), not the genitive plural found in Galician usage (двадцять один років), and that all parts of a compound numeral decline (з чотирьохсот сімдесяти восьми тисяч, § 105.6).

4.2 After два, три, чотири

The noun after два, три, чотири is in the nominative plural; historically it was the dual, which survives in a few forms. Smerechynskyi (ch. XI.10) gives as the norm of his time (the 1930 orthography) the dual forms дві руці, дві нозі, дві вікні with the adjective in the nominative plural, and cites the folk songs два персники золотії, два жупани голубії. The modern standard writes the plural (дві руки, два вікна); дві руці, очі (an old dual, now a plural) and the dual-based stress of some nouns after these numerals are the relics.

The adjective between два/три/чотири and the noun is in the nominative plural (два нові будинки, три великі хати); the genitive plural (два нових будинки) also occurs. In the treebanks (adjectives depending on a nominative or accusative noun with a nummod два, три, чотири, обидва; 2026-11-06) the nominative/accusative form is the majority, 20 against 8 in IU and 9 against 3 in ParlaMint, and the genitive concentrates on masculine nouns: Тому ми сповідуємо два різних світогляди… (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u15.p3.lang1.s2) 'So we profess two different worldviews…'.

4.3 Collective numerals

Двоє, троє, четверо, п'ятеро … десятеро, обоє count persons of mixed or male sex, the young of animals and pluralia tantum, with the genitive plural: двоє дітей 'two children', троє друзів, четверо кошенят 'four kittens', двоє дверей 'two doors', троє саней. They are frequent in speech; in the treebanks двоє occurs 21 times, троє 13, обоє 8, четверо 5 (both treebanks, 2026-11-06). Smerechynskyi (ch. XI.1–2) also records the folk type п'ятеро чоловіка, троє хліба, with a collective numeral and a genitive singular, now dialectal.

4.4 Indefinite quantifiers

Багато, мало, небагато, чимало, кілька, декілька, скільки, стільки, трохи, більшість, меншість take the genitive — plural for countables, singular for masses: багато людей 'many people', багато води 'much water', кілька днів 'a few days', трохи хліба 'a little bread'. In the oblique cases кілька, декілька, скільки, стільки decline (кількох днів, кільком людям), багато has forms багатьох, багатьом, багатьма; мало, чимало, трохи do not.

The verb with a quantifier subject is singular or plural (chapter 21 § 2.4). Janda and Palii (2024, janda-2024-bahato-many) analysed attestations of багато + genitive plural as subject drawn from GRAC (over 1.8 billion words, texts written 1816–2023) by four searches stratified by verb number and word order and found:

• singular in 69.1%, plural in 30.9% overall;
• a change in progress: the plural has risen since about the 1950s and overtaken the singular in the current decade;
• subject-before-verb order and animate nouns favour the plural (Багато людей прийшли), verb-before-subject and inanimate nouns the singular (Прийшло багато людей, Минуло багато років);
• individual verbs have their own preferences, and a few micro-constructions that prefer the singular reduce the individuation of the humans in them (death, disease, subordination to another event);
• they relate the variation to the construal of a plural as a homogeneous mass (singular) or a multiplicity of individuals (plural), and note that the rising plural contrasts with Russian, where no comparable change was found.

The treebanks agree in direction (chapter 21 § 2.4): ParlaMint Про це сьогодні говорили багато моїх колег (ParlaMint-UA_2003-10-14-m0.u151.p2.lang1.s6) 'Many of my colleagues spoke about this today' has the plural with the verb first and an animate noun.

4.5 The numeral phrase in UD

In UD Ukrainian the noun is the head of a numeral phrase. An agreeing numeral is nummod; a numeral that governs the genitive (in the nominative and accusative of п'ять and up, and digits read that way) is nummod:gov; quantifiers are det:numgov (governing) or det:nummod (agreeing, in the oblique cases). The counts (dependent class, case of the numeral → case and number of the noun; UD 2.18, 2026-11-06; the most frequent patterns):

The split is clean: два, три, чотири are never nummod:gov (they agree in every case), and the higher numerals are nummod:gov in the nominative and accusative and nummod in the oblique cases, where they agree. The nummod:gov with a noun tagged singular (46 in IU with digits) are mostly the sign % (27, read відсотка or відсотків) and abbreviated units (грн, км, га), plus decimals with the genitive singular (1,5 відсотка).

4.6 Approximation and fractions

Approximation is expressed by inversion (років п'ять 'about five years': the noun before the numeral; Smerechynskyi ch. XI.12 cites з чайок двісті from the dumas), by близько, приблизно, до + genitive (близько п'яти років, до сотні людей), and by з + accusative (з десяток 'about ten'). Fractions take the genitive singular: пів години 'half an hour', півтора року 'a year and a half', дві третіх відсотка, 2,5 відсотка (read дві цілих п'ять десятих відсотка).

5. Prepositional phrases and case government

5.1 The prepositions and their cases

Each preposition takes one, two or three cases. The commonest in the treebanks, by preposition and case of its noun (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06; IU / ParlaMint):

(— : under 60 in that treebank. The counts sum the lowercase and capitalised forms where both are frequent; у/в and з/із sum the variants.)

ParlaMint's щодо (238) and про (634) show the parliamentary topic of "matters concerning…"; IU's через, під, між the spatial language of fiction.

5.2 Meaning by case

The contrast location (Loc) / direction (Acc) after у/в, на and location (Ins) / direction (Acc) after під, над, за, між, перед is regular.

5.3 У or в: euphony in practice

The choice between у and в (and the conjunctions і/й, chapter 24) is phonetic: the 2019 orthography (§ 23) prescribes у between consonants and at the start of a sentence before a consonant, в between vowels and after a vowel before most consonants, with exceptions before в, ф and clusters such as льв, св, тв; it adds that deviations occur "because of the demands of rhythm or the author's preferences". The treebanks show how far usage follows the rule (the preposition case у or в; the previous and the next word's edge letters; UD 2.18, 2026-11-06):

The rule is followed where a violation would create a vowel cluster (в between vowels: 96–98%); the consonant-cluster side (у between consonants) is kept in edited texts and much less in transcripts, where в is the default spelling of the preposition. The vowel-before-consonant position, where the rule asks for в, has у in 35–41% of cases in both treebanks: the norm is ahead of usage here, or the rule is a preference rather than a constraint.

5.4 Compound prepositions and contested government

Compound prepositions are frequent in official style: відповідно до + Gen 'in accordance with', згідно з + Ins 'according to', у зв'язку з + Ins 'in connection with', на підставі + Gen 'on the basis of', з метою + Gen 'with the aim of', у разі + Gen 'in case of', незважаючи на + Acc 'despite', щодо + Gen 'regarding'. Smerechynskyi (ch. VII.13) discussed their stylistic weight. Some governments are contested or variable:

The variants are measured, not legislated, in this manual: chapter 37 places them on the register scale.

6. Adjective phrases

An adjective takes complements in the case or preposition it governs, and degree modifiers before it:

Degree adverbs precede: дуже гарний 'very beautiful', надто довгий 'too long', зовсім новий 'quite new', трохи втомлений 'a little tired', вкрай важливий 'extremely important'. An adjective phrase with a complement after the noun is set off by commas: людина, гідна поваги. In UD the complement is obl (with a preposition or a case) or xcomp (infinitive) of the adjective; the degree adverb is advmod (86% of advmod precede their head in IU, 84% in ParlaMint).

7. Comparison

7.1 The forms

The 2019 orthography (§ 104) gives the synthetic comparative in -іш- or -ш- (нов-іш-ий 'newer', дешев-ш-ий 'cheaper', солод-ш-ий) and the analytic with більш, менш ("less often": більш вдалий), the superlative with най- (найбільший, найкраща) or найбільш, найменш (again "less often"), and the intensified superlative with що-, як- written together: щонайсильніший, якнайбільший, якнайшвидше 'as fast as possible'. The suppletive forms: добрий → кращий / ліпший, поганий → гірший, великий → більший, малий → менший. A double comparative, більш вищий, is outside the standard.

7.2 The standard of comparison

The superlative standard: найкращий з усіх, найкращий серед учнів, найкращий у класі.

7.3 Comparison of equality

такий самий, як; такий же, як; так само, як; такий … як: Він такий самий високий, як брат 'He is just as tall as his brother'. Correlative pairs of this type (так — як, як — так) are in Smerechynskyi ch. XXV and chapter 24.

8. Adverb phrases

Adverbs take degree modifiers (дуже швидко, надто пізно), comparatives (швидше, більш вдало), and some take complements: незалежно від погоди 'regardless of the weather', відповідно до закону (the compound preposition grows from such adverbs), близько до хати. Adverbs of quantity are the quantifiers of § 4.4 (багато, мало) when they have a genitive; without one they modify verbs (Він багато працює 'He works a lot').

9. Varieties and styles as deltas

10. Quick reference: phrases in UD

11. How Mova handles it

The fact extractor kg/src/uk.rs (chapter 20 § 12) builds noun phrases inside its members:

• Adjectives before a noun are linked to it when they agree (fn adj_agrees: case, number, gender in the singular, animacy in the accusative); a chain of pre-modifiers is resolved right to left (the premod array). Unattached adjectives go to the nearest agreeing head.
• Genitive attributes: a non-pronominal genitive right after a noun is its attribute.
• Prepositional phrases: a preposition, optional agreeing adjectives, and a noun in a case the preposition governs (VESUM rv_*); when several cases fit, the preference is Loc, Acc, Ins, Gen, Dat (PP_CASE_ORDER), and Gen first after pronouns (у мене), after з/із/зі/зо, and for an animate noun after у/в whose Gen and Acc coincide (у друга). The relation keeps the preposition and case: adverbial:в+v_mis.
• Quantity words (QUANT: багато, мало, кілька, декілька, чимало, небагато, скільки, стільки, трохи, достатньо, недостатньо, більше, менше, повно, обмаль, замало, забагато) + a genitive noun become a member quantity:<word>.
• Numerals are not handled: VESUM's numr part of speech (value 9 in POS_NAMES) is never used by the rules, and digits reject the sentence (Reject::Digit).
• Comparison is not handled: a comparative adjective is an ordinary adjective, and за брата, від мене are prepositional phrases that must attach as adverbials of a verb.

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

11.2 Not yet

• No numerals: neither the agreement of два, три, чотири nor the government of п'ять and above; no digits.
• Quantifier phrases are members but not subjects; no choice of verb number.
• No comparison constructions, no possessive adjectives as such (they are adjectives), no apposition, no relative clauses or participle phrases (commas reject the sentence).
• The extractor does not check the у/в or і/й euphony, and has no register labels for contested governments (згідно закону, по питанню).
• No Ukrainian UD parser.

12. Sources

• Smerechynskyi, Serhii. 1932. Нариси з української синтакси. Kharkiv. Ch. VI (time constructions, за + Gen), ch. VII (prepositions: по + Acc, compound prepositions), ch. VIII (the possessive adjective instead of the possessive genitive), ch. XI (numerals: collectives, approximation, agreement after два–чотири and after двадцять один), ch. XVIII and XXI (verbal nouns), ch. XXV (correlatives). smerechynskyi-1932-narysy-z-ukrainskoi-syntaksy (public domain in UA/EU)
• Український правопис. 2019. § 23 (у/в), § 32.4 (feminine personal nouns), § 104 (degrees of comparison), § 105 (cardinal numerals). ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019 (official text)
• Janda, Laura A. and Yuliia Palii. 2024. Understanding 'many' through the lens of Ukrainian багато. Russian Linguistics 48. janda-2024-bahato-many (CC BY 4.0)
• Synchak, Olena and Vasyl Starko. 2022. Ukrainian Feminine Personal Nouns in Online Dictionaries and Corpora. COLINS 2022. synchak-2022-feminine-dictionaries (CC BY 4.0)
• Universal Dependencies 2.18: UD_Ukrainian-IU (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; counts only), UD_Ukrainian-ParlaMint (CC BY-SA 4.0; quoted by sent_id); counted 2026-11-06, all splits.
• Folk songs as cited by Smerechynskyi (два персники золотії); public domain.
• Mova: kg/src/uk.rs (fn verbal, fn adj_agrees, PP_CASE_ORDER, PP_PRON_CASE_ORDER, QUANT), kg/src/gram.rs (POS_NAMES), kg/src/morph.rs (gov_mask), kg — the Mova knowledge graph.

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