🗣️ 23. Complementation

A Ukrainian verb chooses its complements by case and by preposition, and it may take a clause or an infinitive. The direct object is in the accusative (читати книжку (chytaty knyzhku) 'read a book'), but a large class of verbs takes the genitive (боятися темряви 'fear the dark', шукати допомоги 'seek help'), a smaller one the dative (допомагати матері 'help one's mother') or the instrumental (керувати школою 'run a school'), and many a prepositional phrase (думати про дім 'think about home', чекати на автобус 'wait for the bus'). Even the accusative object alternates with the genitive: for a part of a mass (випити води 'drink some water'), under negation (не бачу книжки 'I don't see the book', chapter 27), and with verbs of wanting and expecting (чекати листа / лист). Clausal complements are introduced by що (statement), щоб or аби (wish, purpose, command), чи (question) and як (perceived event); infinitive complements share the subject of the main verb (хочу спати 'I want to sleep') or the object (просив його прийти 'asked him to come'). Secondary predicates are in the instrumental (обрали його головою 'they elected him chairman'). This chapter gives the patterns, the treebank counts, the variation between norm and usage, and how far Mova reads them.

Contents

1. The kinds of complement
2. The accusative object and its genitive alternatives
3. Dative and instrumental objects
4. Two objects
5. Prepositional objects (obl:arg)
6. Clausal complements: що, щоб/аби, чи, як
7. Reported speech
8. Infinitive complements and control
9. Secondary predicates
10. Verbs of perception
11. Varieties and styles as deltas
12. Quick reference: complements in UD
13. How Mova handles it
14. Sources

Related chapters: the clause and its predicate types in 21. Clause structure; phrase-level government in 22. Phrases; adverbial clauses and щоб of purpose in 24. Coordination and subordination; the genitive of negation in 27. Negation; aspect in 13. Verbs; questions in 26. Questions.

Conventions as in chapter 20. Counts: UD 2.18 (IU, counts only; ParlaMint, quoted by sent_id), all splits, awk, 2026-11-06; news counts: Leipzig ukr_news_2024 (CC BY), grep, 2026-11-06.

1. The kinds of complement

2. The accusative object and its genitive alternatives

2.1 The cases of nominal objects

The case of nominal obj (NOUN, PRON, PROPN), with or without a не among the verb's dependents (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06):

The accusative is the object case (75% of nominal obj in IU, 90% in ParlaMint). The genitive is the second object case: 15% in IU, 9.5% in ParlaMint. Under negation the genitive takes 63% of the objects in IU (256 against 149 accusatives) and 42% in ParlaMint (143 against 195) — the genitive of negation is strong in writing and weakening in speech (chapter 27). The datives and instrumentals among IU's obj reflect its practice of labelling a verb's only object obj whatever its case (chapter 20 § 9.3); ParlaMint labels the dative iobj.

2.2 Genitive verbs

A group of verbs governs the genitive. The frequent heads of genitive obj in IU are бути (49, existential negation не було чого), мати (46, mostly negated), немати (39), становити (22, становити 5 відсотків 'amount to 5 per cent', with numerals), давати (14), робити (13), вимагати (9), потребувати (8), боятися (8), шукати (7), позбутися (7), набути (7), стосуватися (7); in ParlaMint просити (46), мати (45), потребувати (14), вимагати (10) (2026-11-06). By meaning:

Several of these alternate with the accusative, with a difference of definiteness: чекати листа (indefinite, 'wait for a letter') / чекати лист (a known one), просити хліба / просити гроші, хотіти води / хотіти воду. With просити ParlaMint has the genitive in formulas (прошу уваги, прошу тиші) and the accusative with a definite thing (Прошу передати слово…: an infinitive).

2.3 The partitive genitive

A mass noun or plural in the genitive denotes an indefinite part: випити води 'drink some water', дати хліба 'give some bread', купити цукру, налити чаю, нарвати квітів. The traditional grammars tie this genitive to perfective verbs, especially with the prefixes на-, на-…-ся, по-, від- (наїстися хліба 'eat one's fill of bread', відрізати сала 'cut off some lard'). Chaika, Lehka, Tamm and Vaiss (2024, chaika-2024-partitive-uktenten) checked this against the ukTenTen 2020 web corpus with concrete and abstract mass nouns as objects of aspect pairs. They found that imperfective verbs occur regularly with partitive genitive objects (the genitive is not limited to perfectives), and that for abstract mass nouns the aspect has no influence on the object case; the classical link between the partitive and perfectivity holds as a tendency for concrete masses, not as a rule. Their example of the folk-culinary register, Цього дня годиться зварити борщу з півнем 'On this day it is proper to cook borscht with a rooster', shows the genitive object of a perfective infinitive.

Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. XVI.5) adds a related pattern: an infinitive of purpose after a verb of motion takes the genitive, Пішов на поле косити пшениці 'He went to the field to mow wheat' (not пшеницю), which he calls the folk norm. In current prose the accusative is usual there.

2.4 Animacy

The accusative of masculine animate nouns in the singular, and of all animate plurals, equals the genitive: бачу брата, бачу братів, бачу сестер. Some masculine inanimates take the genitive-like accusative in the singular in speech and in set expressions (написати листа, з'їсти банана, купити олівця); the standard admits both лист and листа as accusatives of лист 'letter', and VESUM lists both (the kg measurement of Пишу листа in chapter 21 § 12 reads it as the accusative).

3. Dative and instrumental objects

3.1 Dative

Verbs of helping, hindering, believing, thanking, rejoicing, belonging, and of saying to someone govern the dative: допомагати, заважати, вірити, довіряти, дякувати, радіти, заздрити, належати, подобатися (the experiencer is dative, the thing liked is the subject: Мені подобається музика 'I like music'), відповідати, казати, повідомляти, підлягати, служити, шкодити. In IU, the commonest heads of a dative obj are казати (23), подобатися (11), сказати, підлягати, дозволити, відповідати (9 each) (2026-11-06). Дякувати takes the dative in the standard (дякую вам); the accusative дякую вас is non-standard (heard in speech and in surzhyk, perhaps under Russian благодарю вас).

3.2 Instrumental

Verbs of governing, possessing, using, and of attitude govern the instrumental: керувати, управляти, володіти, користуватися, цікавитися, захоплюватися, пишатися, займатися, опікуватися, нехтувати, хворіти (хворіти грипом 'have the flu'), пахнути (пахне медом 'smells of honey'; IU has 7 such objects), торгувати. In IU these are partly obj, partly obl; ParlaMint has 60 instrumental obl:arg.

4. Two objects

Verbs of giving, telling and showing take an accusative and a dative: дати братові книжку 'give the brother a book', сказати мамі правду 'tell mum the truth', показати гостям місто. Verbs of depriving and teaching take an accusative and a genitive: позбавити його права 'deprive him of the right', навчити дітей грамоти 'teach the children to read'. Verbs of naming and electing take an accusative and an instrumental (§ 9).

The order of the dative and the accusative was given by Smal-Stotsky and Gartner (1913, § 62) as dative first (Напишу братові лист), the shorter before the longer. The treebanks show that this holds in writing and not in speech (iobj and obj of the same verb; UD 2.18, 2026-11-06):

ParlaMint's majority for accusative-first comes from formulas in which the accusative is short and given and the dative a long name: Прошу передати слово Миколі Сольському (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u104.p1.lang1.s2) 'I ask that the floor be given to Mykola Solskyi'. The principle is the same as Smal-Stotsky's second rule: given and short first, new and long last.

5. Prepositional objects (obl:arg)

Many verbs take a fixed preposition with a fixed case. ParlaMint annotates these as obl:arg; its distribution (preposition + case of the noun, all splits, 2026-11-06): bare genitive 103, на + Acc 87, до + Gen 85, bare instrumental 60, в + Acc 14, bare dative 14, на + Loc 9, від + Gen 7, з + Ins 7, з + Gen 6, bare accusative 6, в + Loc 5, під + Acc 5, за + Acc 4, про + Acc 4 (total 435).

Where the standard and other varieties choose different prepositions, the delta table (§ 11) lists them.

6. Clausal complements: що, щоб/аби, чи, як

6.1 The complementisers

The marks of ccomp in the treebanks (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06; lowercase marks):

Що introduces about two thirds of the complement clauses; щоб is three times more frequent in parliamentary speech (requests and appeals) than in IU's mixed writing. The colloquial шо (the eastern and southern pronunciation of що) appears five times in IU's fiction and posts.

6.2 Щоб and the subjunctive

After щоб the verb of a clause with its own subject is in the past form whatever the time: Я хочу, щоб ти прийшов завтра 'I want you to come tomorrow'; this is the Ukrainian subjunctive (щоб is historically що + б). With the same subject, the infinitive is used: Я прийшов, щоб допомогти 'I came to help'. The 2019 orthography (§ 43) distinguishes the conjunction щоб from the pronoun що + particle б by stress: Він сказав, щоб усі прийшли against Що б ви сказали, коли б я не приїхав? 'What would you say if I didn't come?'.

6.3 Аби and щоб

Аби is the second conjunction of wish and purpose. Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. XXVI) rejected the restriction of аби to the sense 'if only' (Russian лишь бы) and the claim that it is a Polonism: it occurs in Old Ukrainian, is used "not only in Galicia but also in Podillia, Volhynia, the Kyiv and Kherson regions — perhaps more than half of all Ukraine", and is used by the classics (Rudanskyi, Svydnytskyi, Kotsiubynskyi, Kulish). Beside the meaning it shares with щоб, it has, he argues, a nuance of condition, supposition and greater softness. Both are standard; аби is commoner in western Ukrainian and in speech. In the treebanks аби is a mark 10 times in IU and 23 times in ParlaMint, щоб 148 + 17 and 273 + 9 (all clause types; 2026-11-06).

6.4 The correlative те

A complement clause can be anticipated by the demonstrative те in the case the verb governs: Я думаю про те, що буде завтра 'I think about what will be tomorrow'; Ми наполягаємо на тому, щоб…: Ви не наполягаєте на тому, щоб голосувати, ні? (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u213.p1.lang1.s1) 'You do not insist on a vote, do you?'. The correlative is obligatory when the verb takes a preposition (думати про, наполягати на, залежати від), and optional with direct-object verbs (Я знаю (те), що…). UD has те as obl or obj and the clause as its acl or as ccomp of the verb; the expl relation (116 in IU, 135 in ParlaMint) covers це and то used as correlates.

7. Reported speech

Reported speech after що keeps the tense of the original: Він сказав, що прийде 'He said he would come' (lit. 'that he will come'); Вона казала, що хворіє 'She said she was ill' (lit. 'is ill'). There is no sequence of tenses. Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. XVII) goes further: the folk language, he says, reports speech essentially in one way — in the form of direct speech, introduced only by що, keeping the speaker's persons as well: А вона почала казати, що я знаю поганеньку 'And she began to say that I [she] know a nasty one'; the school rule that reported speech must be shifted into the third person with matching changes of the verb forms is "not proper to the Ukrainian folk language". In the modern standard the persons are shifted (Вона сказала, що вона знає), but the folk pattern survives in speech, and the absence of tense shift is general.

8. Infinitive complements and control

8.1 Same-subject (subject control)

Modal, phasal and volitional verbs and adjectives take an infinitive that shares their subject (chapter 21 § 1): Я хочу спати, Він почав читати, Вона повинна прийти, Ми готові допомогти. The heads of an infinitive xcomp without an object (858 in IU, 1 300 in ParlaMint) are mainly могти, хотіти, мати, повинен, почати, мусити, змогти, намагатися (2026-11-06).

8.2 Object control

Verbs of asking, ordering, allowing, advising, helping and teaching take an object and an infinitive whose understood subject is that object: Я прошу вас сісти 'I ask you to sit down' (Acc), Він дозволив мені піти 'He allowed me to go' (Dat), Мама навчила мене читати 'Mum taught me to read' (Acc), Закликаю всіх голосувати 'I call on everybody to vote' (Acc). The case of the object is the case the verb governs. In the treebanks an infinitive xcomp whose head also has a nominal obj or iobj occurs 107 times in IU and 189 in ParlaMint; the heads in ParlaMint are просити + Acc (60), закликати + Acc (17), запропонувати + Dat (9), рекомендувати + Dat (7), дозволити + Dat (6), доручити + Dat (6); in IU дозволити/дозволяти + Dat (14), запропонувати + Dat (5) (2026-11-06). The parliamentary formula Прошу підтримати та проголосувати (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u99.p4.lang1.s2) 'I ask you to support and vote' has the object left out.

8.3 Dative + infinitive

An impersonal predicative or verb with a dative experiencer takes an infinitive whose subject is the dative: Мені треба йти, Нам довелося чекати 'We had to wait', Мені нема куди йти 'I have nowhere to go' (IU has 12 немати + Dat + infinitive), Тобі вирішувати 'It's for you to decide' (chapter 21 §§ 5, 7).

8.4 Infinitive of purpose and other uses

After verbs of motion an infinitive gives the purpose: Я йду спати, Пішов купувати хліб. An infinitive can be the complement of a noun (бажання вчитися, acl) or of an adjective (готовий допомогти). Smerechynskyi (ch. XVI.12) records the folk type Хвалилася бити 'She boasted that she would beat', with the infinitive instead of a що-clause after verbs of saying and boasting (Хвалилися три ляшеньки козаченька вбити, folk song), now archaic.

8.5 The form of the infinitive

The standard infinitive ends in -ти (ходити, сказати); the 2019 orthography (§ 118, note 1) admits -ть after a vowel "in oral speech and sometimes in the literary style" (брать, казать, терпіть, ходить). The -ть form is thus a standard colloquial and poetic variant as well as the Russian ending; Hentschel and Palinska (2022, hentschel-2022-mesolect-infinitive), analysing about 10 000 infinitives in a surzhyk corpus from several regions, found that -ть is by no means universal in surzhyk and -ти far from marginal: the share of -ть is highest in the oblasts bordering Belarus and Russia and where Russian has long been strong (Kharkiv), and the regional distribution of the two endings in the traditional dialects shapes their distribution in regional surzhyk, which they read as structure-building in a mesolect, not chaos. In the treebanks the -ть infinitive is rare: 19 of 2 384 infinitives in IU (0.8%, in fiction and dialogue: віддать, показать, взять, ждать), 15 of 3 409 in ParlaMint (0.4%), of which 11 are сказать, most of them in the Russian formula так сказать 'so to speak' (standard так би мовити); in the Leipzig news sample сказать does not occur, against 710 сказати (2026-11-06).

9. Secondary predicates

A predicate noun or adjective that describes the object or the subject of another verb is in the instrumental: Його обрали головою 'He was elected chairman', Вважаю це помилкою 'I consider this a mistake', Назвали сина Іваном 'They named their son Ivan', Він повернувся додому героєм 'He came home a hero', Оголошую засідання закритим 'I declare the session closed'. ParlaMint: Шановні колеги, пленарне засідання Верховної Ради оголошую закритим (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u269.p15.lang1.s1) 'Dear colleagues, I declare the plenary session of the Verkhovna Rada closed'; Але давайте будемо відвертими (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u240.p2.lang1.s1) 'But let us be frank'.

In IU (xcomp:pred, 336 occurrences, 2026-11-06) the predicate is an instrumental noun in 154 cases, an instrumental adjective in 98, a nominative noun or adjective in 42 (mostly with називатися, зватися: Село зветься Мала Вільшанка), an accusative noun in 13, an instrumental pronoun or determiner in 13. The heads: стати 73, називати 27, вважати 21, ставати 19, виявитися 14, назвати 13, називатися 11, виглядати 9, здаватися 9. Smerechynskyi (ch. IX) lists, as folk alternatives to the predicative instrumental, the nominative (Став він великий), the accusative and prepositional phrases (обрали за голову, пішов у солдати, взяти за жінку 'take as a wife'); за + Acc and у/в + Acc plural (піти в солдати, вибрати в депутати) remain standard.

10. Verbs of perception

Бачити, чути, помічати, відчувати take an object (Я бачу хату), a clause with як for a perceived event (Я бачив, як він ішов), a clause with що for a perceived fact (Я бачу, що ти втомився 'I see that you are tired'), or a participle or converb phrase. In the treebanks their ccomp is marked by що (15 in IU, 17 in ParlaMint), як (7, 2) or nothing (14, 9) (2026-11-06).

The accusative with an infinitive after a perception verb, Я його бачив ходити 'I saw him walk', is the old Slavonic construction that Smerechynskyi (ch. XVI.13) records in Ukrainian (also in Church Slavonic, Slovene, Croatian, Serbian, Czech) with a parallel converb construction Забачила Василечка орючи 'She saw Vasylechko ploughing'. In the modern standard the як-clause is the norm and the infinitive pattern is rare and folk. The predicatives видно, чути make perception impersonal: Чути спів, Було видно гори (chapter 21 § 7).

11. Varieties and styles as deltas

12. Quick reference: complements in UD

13. How Mova handles it

The fact extractor kg/src/uk.rs (chapter 20 § 12) reads complements as follows:

• Objects by government. Each remaining noun becomes object:<case>, the case chosen among those the verb governs (fn governs, VESUM rv_* marks loaded by kg/src/morph.rs, gov_mask); with unknown government any case is allowed. The preference is Acc, Dat, Ins, Gen; under negation Acc, Gen, Dat, Ins, and a transitive verb also takes the genitive under negation.
• The partitive genitive is preferred over a homonymous accusative plural when the verb can govern the genitive and the noun has a genitive singular (попросити допомоги, випити води).
• Two objects in the same case reject the sentence ("we do not guess").
• Infinitives: after a verb on the MODAL list (хотіти, могти, мусити, вміти, мати, бажати, любити, почати, перестати, збиратися, намагатися, старатися, стати, продовжувати, кинути, вирішити, планувати, забути, встигнути, наважитися …) one infinitive becomes predicate:infinitive, and the objects after it are governed by the infinitive; after any other verb, an infinitive rejects the sentence (object-control verbs such as просити, дозволити are not on the list).
• Clauses: commas and the conjunctions що, щоб, чи, як, коли, якщо… are gates that reject the sentence (CONJ, Reject::Punct); there are no clausal complements.
• Secondary predicates are not recognised; an instrumental noun becomes object:v_oru.

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

13.2 Not yet

• No clausal complements of any kind; no reported speech.
• No object control: only the MODAL list licenses an infinitive.
• No secondary predicates; the possessive/accusative homonymy of його, її, їх is resolved for the possessive when an agreeing noun is near.
• No distinction between the partitive and the genitive of negation in the output (both are object:v_rod); the definiteness difference of чекати листа / лист is not represented.
• No Ukrainian UD parser and no Ukrainian pragmatic labels.

14. Sources

• Smerechynskyi, Serhii. 1932. Нариси з української синтакси. Kharkiv. Ch. IX (the predicative instrumental and its alternatives), ch. XVI.5 (infinitive + genitive after motion verbs), XVI.12 (хвалилася бити), XVI.13 (я його бачив ходити), ch. XVII (reported speech), ch. XXVI (аби and щоб). smerechynskyi-1932-narysy-z-ukrainskoi-syntaksy (public domain in UA/EU)
• Smal-Stotsky, Stepan and Theodor Gartner. 1913. Grammatik der ruthenischen (ukrainischen) Sprache. § 62 (order of objects). stockyj-1913-ruthenische-grammatik (public domain)
• Український правопис. 2019. § 43 (щоб against що б), § 118 (the infinitive in -ти and -ть). ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019 (official text)
• Chaika, Lesia, Natalia Lehka, Anne Tamm and Natalia Vaiss. 2024. Ukrainian Aspect and Object Case in ukTenTen: The Partitive Genitive of Perfective Verbs and Abstract Nouns. LiVVaL 3. chaika-2024-partitive-uktenten (CC BY 4.0)
• Hentschel, Gerd and Olesya Palinska. 2022. Restructuring in a Mesolect: A Case Study on the Basis of the Formal Variation of the Infinitive in Ukrainian–Russian Surzhyk. hentschel-2022-mesolect-infinitive (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.
• Leipzig Corpora Collection, ukr_news_2024 (CC BY); counted with grep 2026-11-06.
• Mova: kg/src/uk.rs (fn verbal, fn governs, OBJ_CASE_ORDER, MODAL, CONJ), kg/src/morph.rs (gov_mask), kg — the Mova knowledge graph.

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