🗣️ 27. Negation

Ukrainian negates a clause with the unstressed particle не (ne) placed directly before the verb: Я не знаю (Ya ne znaiu) 'I don't know'. The same не placed before another word negates that word only (Не я це зробив 'It wasn't me who did it'). Negative pronouns and adverbs in ні- (ніхто 'nobody', нічого 'nothing', ніколи 'never') do not replace the verbal не but require it, and any number of them can stand in one clause: Ніхто нікому нічого не сказав 'Nobody said anything to anybody' (negative concord). A negated transitive verb can take its object in the genitive instead of the accusative (не бачу книжки beside не бачу книжку 'I don't see the book'), and existence is denied with немає/нема + genitive (Тут немає води 'There is no water here'). A separate series of *не-*words with stressed не́ (не́кого, не́чого, не́коли) means 'there is nobody / nothing / no time to…'. Prefixal не- builds adjectives, adverbs and nouns, and the 2019 orthography regulates when не is written together and when apart. This chapter describes these forms, the drift of the genitive of negation towards the accusative in current speech, the many expressive negative constructions of the folk language, and what Mova reads of them.

Contents:

1. Sentential negation: не before the verb
2. Constituent and contrastive negation
3. Ні, ані, ні … ні
4. Negative concord: the ні- series
5. Не́кого, не́чого: the series of absent possibility
6. Existential negation: немає, нема, не було, не буде
7. The genitive of negation and its retreat
8. Negative imperatives and aspect
9. Expletive and non-negative не
10. Expressive negative constructions of the folk language
11. Prefixal не-: adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs
12. Spelling не and ні (2019 orthography)
13. Litotes and understatement
14. History: one negator, many reinforcers
15. Variation as a delta over the standard
16. Counts in the treebanks
17. Quick reference: negation in UD
18. How Mova handles it
19. Sources

Related chapters: the pronoun series in 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals; case government and the genitive in 22. Phrases; negative questions in 26. Questions; the negated -но/-то form in 28. Voice and the passive; negative prefixes in word formation in 16. Derivation: prefixes; presupposition and implicature under negation in 33. Implicature and presupposition.

1. Sentential negation: не before the verb

1.1 The rule

Не stands immediately before the word it negates; to negate the whole clause it stands before the finite verb, or before the non-finite or nominal predicate if there is no finite verb (Smal-Stockyj 1913, § 62.3):

With a compound future and with modal verbs, the position of не changes the meaning: не можу спати negates the possibility; можу не спати negates the sleeping. Nothing else may come between не and the negated word except the particles ж, же, б, би in some styles (не ж, mostly in older and dialect speech).

1.2 Pronunciation

Не is a proclitic, unstressed and pronounced together with the following word: не знаю /neˈznaju/. The stressed не́ belongs to a different series (§5). The negative answer and free-standing 'no' is ні (§3).

1.3 Frequency

Не is one of the commonest words: 1,391 tokens tagged PART Polarity=Neg with relation advmod in IU, 1,183 with relation advmod:neg in ParlaMint (all splits, UD 2.18, 2026-11-06). Its head is a verb in 1,005 of 1,425 IU tokens and 877 of 1,239 ParlaMint tokens; the rest negate adverbs, nouns (mostly nominal predicates and contrastive constituents), adjectives and pronouns. Не stands directly before its head in 1,280 IU and 1,054 ParlaMint cases; the non-adjacent cases are mostly analytic predicates where the treebank takes the lexical word as head (не можна було, не буде робити).

2. Constituent and contrastive negation

Не before any word other than the predicate negates that word, and the clause is otherwise affirmative:

• Не я це зробив. 'It wasn't me who did it.' (someone did)
• Він приїхав не вчора, а сьогодні. 'He came not yesterday but today.'
• Мені потрібна не порада, а допомога. 'I need not advice but help.'
• Не кожен це зрозуміє. 'Not everyone will understand this.'

The corrective не X, а Y is the commonest form; 2019 orthography § 44 (1.4) gives не as written apart in exactly this case, when it "is only a negation" of a word and not part of one concept: Не доля вирішує — людина творить свою долю; Йому бракує не вміння виконати цю роботу, а бажання.

Word order cooperates: the negated constituent is usually moved to the front or to the focus position, and the verb is affirmative (Не я це зробив: зробив is not negated, so a negative pronoun in the clause is impossible: ✗ Не я нічого зробив).

3. Ні, ані, ні … ні

3.1 Ні 'no'

Ні (ni) is the stressed free-standing negative: the answer 'no', the second option of … чи ні?, and the negation of an elided predicate: Ти підеш? — Ні.; Я піду, а він ні. Smal-Stockyj (1913, § 58) compares ні : не with French non : ne.

3.2 Ні … ні, ані … ані 'neither … nor'

Correlative ні … ні (emphatic ані … ані) negates coordinated constituents; the verb keeps its не:

• Ні брат, ні сестра не прийшли. 'Neither the brother nor the sister came.'
• Він не їсть ні м'яса, ні риби. 'He eats neither meat nor fish.'
• Ні сюди ні туди 'neither here nor there'; ні живий ні мертвий 'more dead than alive' (fixed phrases; § 44.1.8 of the orthography writes ні apart in them).

3.3 Ні, ані 'not even'

Before a noun or a numeral, ні and ані mean 'not a single, not even', with the noun in the genitive: ні кроку далі 'not a step further'; ані слова 'not a word'; Я не маю ні копійки 'I haven't a kopeck'. With a verb, ані gives an emphatic negation: Він ані поворухнувся 'He didn't stir at all' (here ані replaces не, a literary emphatic use).

Treebank counts (all splits, 2026-11-06): ні as CCONJ cc 33 (IU) and 23 (ParlaMint); ні as PART advmod/advmod:neg 17 and 13; ані CCONJ 15 in IU; ні as INTJ answer 17 in IU (discourse 11, root 6), and as PART root/parataxis 9 in ParlaMint.

4. Negative concord: the ні- series

4.1 The series

The nominative 'nothing' is ніщо in literary style (Ніщо не вічне 'Nothing is eternal'); elsewhere нічого serves as subject and object alike (Нічого не сталося 'Nothing happened').

4.2 Concord

A *ні-*word never negates the clause by itself: the verb must have не, and further *ні-*words simply add to the negation (Smal-Stockyj 1913, § 58: не stands with the verb "even when other parts of the sentence are already negated", with the example І нічого не знаю 'And I know nothing'):

• Ніхто не прийшов. 'Nobody came.'
• Я нікого не бачив. 'I saw nobody.'
• Ніхто нікому нічого не винен. 'Nobody owes anybody anything.'
• Він ніколи ніде не був. 'He has never been anywhere.'
• Жодна людина не відповіла. 'Not a single person answered.'

Without не the sentence is ungrammatical (✗ Ніхто прийшов). The *ні-*words are therefore "negative polarity" words of a strict kind: they occur only in clauses negated by не (or без 'without': без жодної причини 'for no reason at all'), and they are the normal Ukrainian translation of English any under negation (I didn't see anybody = Я нікого не бачив).

4.3 With prepositions

A preposition splits the *ні-*word: ні з ким 'with nobody', ні до кого 'to nobody', ні на що 'on nothing', ні в якому разі 'in no case'. The orthography writes them as three words (2019, § 44.1.9). The negative concord is unchanged: Я ні з ким не говорив 'I talked to nobody'.

4.4 Counts

PronType=Neg tokens (all splits, 2026-11-06): IU ніхто 62, ніколи 44, ніщо 42, жодний 41, ніякий 17, ніяк 16, ніде 7, нікуди 4, нізвідки 2, нізащо 2, жадний 2 (239 in all); ParlaMint жодний 53, ніхто 33, ніщо 29, ніякий 25, ніколи 21, ніяк 2, нікуди 1, ніде 1 (165). The parliamentary preference for жодний (жодного рішення, жодних підстав) is an official-style mark; жадний is the older variant.

5. Не́кого, не́чого: the series of absent possibility

A second series has a stressed не́ and means 'there is no one / nothing / no place / no time to…'. It is used with an infinitive and a dative subject, and the verb 'be' is zero in the present, було in the past and буде in the future:

Contrast with the *ні-*series: Я нікого не питав 'I asked nobody' (a fact) against Мені не́кого питати 'I have nobody to ask' (an absence of possibility). The analytic equivalent with нема(є) is equally standard and more frequent in speech: Мені нема кого питати, нема чого робити, нема куди йти.

The series has a variant with stressed ні́-: the orthography lists ні́коли beside ніко́ли, ні́куди beside ніку́ди, ні́як beside нія́к (§ 44.2), where the forms with stress on ні́ belong to the absent-possibility series (Мені ні́коли = Мені не́коли "I have no time") and the forms with stress on the root are the negative-concord words of §4 (ніко́ли "never"). In writing the two are distinguished only by context. All these forms are written as one word.

In UD the *не́-*words are tagged as pronouns or adverbs with PronType=Neg in some treebanks and as Ind in others; the IU and ParlaMint counts above contain no *не́-*word among the PronType=Neg lemmas, so these words are not counted there.

6. Existential negation: немає, нема, не було, не буде

6.1 The construction

Denial of existence or presence uses an impersonal clause in which the thing absent is in the genitive and the verb is neuter singular:

The affirmative counterpart has a nominative subject and agreement: Тут є вода; Він був удома. The negation thus changes the subject into a genitive and removes agreement: Брат був удома — Брата не було вдома 'The brother was not at home'.

The parliamentary chair's Михайла Віталійовича немає, да? 'Mykhailo Vitaliiovych isn't here, right?' (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u116.p2.lang1.s1) is the pattern with a person.

6.2 Немає or нема

Both forms are standard. Немає is the usual written form; нема is colloquial, poetic and very common in speech and folk song (Нема в світі правди). In the 2024 Leipzig news sample, немає occurs 7,778 times and нема 642 (92% немає). In ParlaMint, немає (VERB and ADV) occurs 106 times and нема 24; in IU немає 47 and нема 31 (fiction and dialogue raise нема). Нема also forms the analytic absent-possibility series of §5 (нема кого, нема чого).

6.3 In UD

The two treebanks disagree on the part of speech: IU tags немає/нема as VERB; ParlaMint mostly as ADV (87 of 130), sometimes VERB. ParlaMint marks the genitive absentee as nsubj (100 genitive nsubj dependents of немає/нема, one nominative); IU as obj (39 genitive obj). Counting the genitive of negation across treebanks therefore requires treating the two analyses as one.

7. The genitive of negation and its retreat

7.1 The traditional rule

The direct object of a negated transitive verb may stand in the genitive: Я не бачу книжки 'I don't see the book'; Він не читав газет 'He hasn't read newspapers'; Не мечіть бісеру перед свиньми 'Do not cast pearls before swine'. The genitive is strongly preferred, close to obligatory:

• with *ні-*words and жодний: Я не бачив жодної машини 'I didn't see a single car'; не сказав ні слова;
• with the verb мати 'have': Я не маю часу 'I have no time';
• with abstract and indefinite objects: не звертати уваги 'pay no attention', не мати права, не давати спокою;
• in set phrases and proverbs.

7.2 The accusative alternative

The accusative is equally possible, and preferred, when the object is definite, specific or concrete, when it is a person or a proper name, and when the negation does not affect the existence of the object: Я не бачу книжку, яку ти мені дав 'I don't see the book you gave me'; Не кидай свою матір 'Don't abandon your mother'. Syniavskyi (1922, § 50) already states that with negated transitive verbs the object "does not necessarily pass from the accusative into the genitive" and gives examples with the accusative (не перекручуй мої слова 'don't twist my words'; не кидай свою матір). The current norm describes both cases as standard, with the genitive as the more bookish and the accusative as the more neutral choice for definite objects.

7.3 What the treebanks show

Direct objects (obj) that are nouns or proper nouns, in the genitive or accusative, by whether the governing verb has a не dependent (UD 2.18, all splits, 2026-11-06):

The non-negated genitive objects are verbs that govern the genitive anyway (боятися, потребувати, досягти), partitive objects (випити води), and in IU the existential бути (40 genitive objects of negated бути in IU, from не було + genitive, which IU annotates as obj). Excluding бути, the IU genitive share under negation is 194 : 83, 70%.

Three readings of these numbers:

1. Negation still raises the genitive rate sharply in both genres (from 14% to 74% in IU; from 7% to 45% in ParlaMint).
2. In parliamentary speech the accusative is now the majority under negation. The verbs with most negated accusative objects in ParlaMint are прийняти 'adopt' (23: не прийняти закон, a definite bill) and підтримувати (5), both with definite objects; the genitive survives in не мати (38), не давати, не відображати.
3. Edited written Ukrainian keeps the genitive more.

Chaika et al. (2024, chaika-2024-partitive-uktenten), in a study of partitive and accusative objects of perfective-imperfective pairs in the ukTenTen 2020 web corpus, excluded negative sentences from their counts and report as a side finding that, for the pair додати/додавати 'add' alone, they had to set aside 130 negative sentences whose objects were in the accusative — a frequent pattern, not an exception. Their main result, that imperfective verbs regularly take partitive genitive objects and that aspect does not decide the case of abstract mass nouns, shows how many genitive objects have nothing to do with negation.

This is a change in progress that the codified norm already accommodates: grammars present the genitive as traditional and the accusative as acceptable, and speech has moved further than writing.

7.4 The genitive and the subject

Only objects and the subject of existential бути are affected. The subject of an ordinary negated verb stays nominative: Брат не прийшов, not ✗ Брата не прийшло.

8. Negative imperatives and aspect

The positive imperative uses both aspects; the negative imperative (prohibition) is normally imperfective: Зачини двері! 'Close the door!' — Не зачиняй двері! 'Don't close the door!'. A negated perfective imperative is a warning against an unintended event: Не впади! 'Mind you don't fall!'; Не забудь! 'Don't forget!'; Не спізнись! 'Don't be late!'.

The treebanks show the pattern clearly (verbs with Mood=Imp, all splits, 2026-11-06):

The four IU and three ParlaMint negated perfectives are of the warning type. (The large number of positive imperfectives in ParlaMint is the chair's formulas: голосуйте, прошу, давайте.)

Smal-Stockyj (1913, § 55) gives the rule in its simplest form: a negated imperative, or an infinitive used as an imperative, is taken from the imperfective verb (Не роби цього! "Don't do that!"). The negated infinitive follows the same aspect rule: Не палити! 'No smoking!' (imperfective).

9. Expletive and non-negative не

Several constructions contain не without negating the clause:

Smal-Stockyj (§ 58.2) notes the не in би-clauses after verbs of fearing and avoiding (the boys fled "so that they would not be beaten"). In the concessive relatives the older particle is ні (куди оком ні глянь), which Smal-Stockyj describes as a generalising 'ever', not a negation; modern usage prefers не, and the orthography accepts it.

A UD tree marks all these не as advmod with Polarity=Neg, like real negation. A reader of the tree that counts не as negation will read мало не впав as 'did not fall', which is the right truth value, and поки не прийду as 'until I do not come', which is wrong.

10. Expressive negative constructions of the folk language

Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. XXVII) collects negative constructions of the folk language that "give many shades and enliven the language" and that, he says, the literary language of his time hardly knew. Many are still alive in speech and in fiction:

Type 2 is worth noting for parsing: не втече is a negated perfective future, but the meaning is modal ('cannot'), and the tense is often narrative present. Type 6 has the form of a negation and the meaning of an emphatic affirmation (не хто, як Мирон = 'precisely Myron'). The modern standard has kept не то що and не хто інший, як (the latter a written formula), and types 7–9 are regional or old.

11. Prefixal не-: adjectives, adverbs, nouns, verbs

Не- is a productive prefix forming contraries and complements:

The adjective in не- is not the same as the negated adjective: Ця річка неширока 'This river is narrowish' (a property) versus Ця річка не широка 'This river is not wide' (a denial, often followed by а вузька). The orthography's test (§ 44.1.5, note) is to insert the copula є: if не є широка keeps the meaning, write apart; if it breaks it (Цей будинок нестарий 'this house is fairly new'), write together.

Ukrainian also uses the prefixes без- (безсилий 'powerless', безпорадний), анти-, а- (in loanwords) and за-, but не- is the general one. See chapter 16.

12. Spelling не and ні (2019 orthography)

The current rules (Український правопис 2019, § 44, "Particles") are summarised here.

Written apart:

1. не with verbs: не їсти, не може не бачити;
2. не with participles used as predicates, with the -но/-то forms, and with adverbial participles: Праця не закінчена; Праці не закінчено; Підлогу не вимито; Робити не поспішаючи;
3. не with participles that have their own dependents: площа, не засаджена квітами; ще не дописаний лист;
4. не when it only negates a word (contrast, correction): не доля вирішує — людина творить свою долю;
5. не with predicative adjectives that are denied: Ця річка не широка;
6. не with an adjective preceded by a *ні-*word or by зовсім, аж ніяк: Ні до чого не здатна людина; Зовсім не великі обов'язки;
7. не with intensifying adverbs and predicative words and with hyphenated words: не дуже, не зовсім, не можна, не треба, не по-нашому;
8. ні in negations without a verb and in fixed phrases: ні живий ні мертвий, ні кроку далі, ні риба ні м'ясо;
9. ні with oblique forms of pronouns when a preposition stands between: ні в кого, ні до кого, ні з ким, ні за що.

Written together: не as a prefix when the word does not exist without it, in all classes (невільник, негода, ненависть, ненавидіти, нехтувати, невпинно, незабаром); не in adjectives and adverbs that form one concept (неширока річка); the ні- and *не́-*words (ніхто, нічого, ніколи, не́кого, не́чого); ані- in аніскільки, анітрохи, аніяк.

With a hyphen: не before proper names: не-Європа; but with common nouns together: нелюдина, неістота.

The 2019 rules continue the earlier codification on these points; the novelty of 2019 lies elsewhere (see chapter 6). In practice, writers hesitate most over participles with and without dependents and over predicative adjectives, and the corpora show both spellings for such cases.

13. Litotes and understatement

Ukrainian uses negated antonyms for understatement, often with irony:

• непоганий, непогано 'not bad' = 'good', the commonest litotes;
• не дурний 'not stupid' = 'clever, shrewd';
• не без того 'not without that' = 'it happens';
• не з полохливих 'not one of the timid' = 'brave';
• не раз 'not once' = 'many times'; не одна 'not one (woman)' = 'many';
• не дуже 'not very' = 'rather little', a polite softener (Мені не дуже подобається 'I don't much like it').

Не раз and не один are quantifiers in effect: Я не раз казав 'I've said it more than once'. Their pragmatics (scalar implicature and its cancellation) is in chapter 33; irony in chapter 34.

14. History: one negator, many reinforcers

Ukrainian has had a single preverbal negator не throughout its history; it has not developed a bipartite negation of the French ne … pas type, and the "Jespersen cycle" of weakening and reinforcement shows only in the reinforcers that accompany не: зовсім не, аж ніяк не, ані трохи не, ніскільки не, ніколи в світі не, colloquial ну зовсім не, and in the emphatic ані that can replace не in literary style (§3.3). The negative concord of §4 is equally old: Old East Slavic already combined ни- words with не.

The older negative pronoun forms survive regionally: south-western ніц, нич 'nothing' (cognate with Polish nic), found in Smerechynskyi's folk examples (А сам ніц не брав 'And he took nothing himself'; нич не видно 'nothing to be seen'); the standard нічого. The negative genitive-existential нема is attested in old texts and folk song alike.

15. Variation as a delta over the standard

The negation system is stable across varieties. The differences are lexical and in the case of the object.

The surzhyk entry rests on Hentschel (2023, hentschel-2023-surzhyk-lexicon), whose field corpus shows the reply particle da almost consistently in surzhyk and who describes the affirmative-negative pair as da – ne, as in trasjanka; нєт is given here as the Russian form that occurs in mixed speech and is not counted. Dialect forms are left to chapter 8.

16. Counts in the treebanks

UD 2.18, all splits, counted with awk over the CoNLL-U files on 2026-11-06 (IU: counts only; ParlaMint CC BY-SA). Tokens are syntactic words.

The relation advmod:neg is a ParlaMint subtype not used in IU; the two treebanks otherwise analyse не identically.

Leipzig news 2024 (1M sentences, CC BY): немає 7,778, нема 642.

17. Quick reference: negation in UD

18. How Mova handles it

18.1 Negation in the fact extractor

In Mova's Ukrainian fact extractor (kg/src/uk.rs):

• The predicate's grammar code gets the negation flag (NEG, one bit of the 4-byte code in kg/src/gram.rs) when the word immediately before the finite verb is не (fn verbal: if p > 0 && cx.norms[p - 1] == "не"). A не elsewhere becomes a particle member of the fact, without the flag.
• Under negation, the government check (fn governs) admits a genitive object for a verb whose VESUM government is accusative ("не бачу книжки"), and the object case order changes from accusative–dative–instrumental–genitive to accusative–genitive–dative–instrumental ("не мечіть бісеру": genitive before dative).
• *Ні-*words are ordinary pronouns and adverbs for the rules; nothing checks concord.
• render_check restores не when it checks that the fact reproduces every word (kg — the Mova knowledge graph, "Checks"); a unit test proves the check fails on an extra не.

Measured with kg parse (CPU, worktree at commit ac9a23149, VESUM, empty proper-name list; 2026-11-06):

18.2 Not yet

• No existential negation: немає/нема/не було/не буде + genitive, the commonest negative construction of the language, yields no fact.
• No scope: constituent negation (Не я…), не … а …, and negated modals (не можу vs можу не) are not represented.
• No *ні-*word as a negative quantifier: ніхто is a subject like any noun; the fact's negation is right only because the verb carries не.
• No expletive не (§9): мало не впав would be read as 'did not fall', поки не прийде as negated.
• No link between неширокий and не широкий, nor any treatment of litotes.
• No Ukrainian dependency parser or UD baseline (no model in tools/mova-parse, no Cyrillic table in langseg, no row in What every language gets); the English frame reader's negation logic (prag/src/frames.rs, see 27. Negation) is not applied to Ukrainian.

19. Sources

• Smal-Stockyj, Stephan. 1913. Ruthenische Grammatik. Berlin/Leipzig: Göschen. § 55 (negated imperative), § 58 (не with the verb under negative concord; не after verbs of fearing; мало що не 'almost'; ні vs не; generalising ні), § 62.3 (position of не). stockyj-1913-ruthenische-grammatik (public domain).
• Syniavskyi, Oleksa. 1922. Порадник української мови. § 50 (object case with negated transitive verbs). syniavskyi-1922-poradnyk-ukrainskoi-movy-praktychnyi (public domain).
• Smerechynskyi, Serhii. 1932. Нариси з української синтакси. Ch. XXVII (negative constructions and their stylistic weight, types 1–9). smerechynskyi-1932-narysy-z-ukrainskoi-syntaksy (public domain in UA/EU).
• Український правопис. 2019. § 44 (particles: не and ні written apart, together, with a hyphen). ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019 (official document).
• Chaika, Lesia, Natalia Lehka, Anne Tamm, and Natalia Vaiss. 2024. Ukrainian Aspect and Object Case in ukTenTen: The Partitive Genitive of Perfective Verbs and Mass Nouns. In Partitive Constructions and Partitive Elements Within and Across Language Borders in Europe, Edizioni Ca' Foscari. chaika-2024-partitive-uktenten (CC BY 4.0).
• Hentschel, Gerd. 2023. Ukrainian and Russian in the lexicon of Ukrainian Suržyk. hentschel-2023-surzhyk-lexicon (CC BY 4.0).
• UD Ukrainian ParlaMint 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0): sentences cited by sent_id; counts. UD Ukrainian IU 2.18 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0): counts only. Leipzig Corpora Collection, Ukrainian news 2024 (CC BY): counts. All 2026-11-06.
• Mova: kg/src/uk.rs, kg/src/gram.rs, kg — the Mova knowledge graph, What every language gets; the English chapter 27. Negation.

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/uk/27-negation/