🗣️ 28. Voice and the passive

Ukrainian has several ways to say what English says with be + past participle, and they are not interchangeable. The passive participle in -ний/-тий forms a personal passive with a subject that agrees (Будинок збудований (Budynok zbudovanyi) 'The house is built'; Будинок був збудований 'The house was built'). The impersonal form in -но/-то has no subject at all and keeps the object in the accusative (Будинок збудовано 'The house has been built'; Хату збудовано 'The house (acc.) has been built'), a construction characteristic of Ukrainian. Verbs in -ся have passive, reflexive, reciprocal, anticausative and impersonal readings (Будинок будується 'The house is being built'; Двері відчинилися 'The door opened'; Мені не спиться 'I can't sleep'). The third person plural without a subject (Тут будують школу 'They are building a school here') and the impersonal neuter with a natural force (Блискавкою спалило хату 'Lightning burned the house down') are the colloquial and folk ways to leave the agent unnamed. Whether an agent may be added in the instrumental (ухвалено Радою 'adopted by the Rada') is the most argued point of Ukrainian syntactic style. This chapter describes the forms, their meanings and their register, with treebank counts, and what Mova does with them.

Contents:

1. Overview: one event, six constructions
2. The passive participle: forms
3. The personal passive with the participle
4. The -но/-то form
5. The agent: instrumental, від + genitive, or none
6. Verbs in -ся: the readings
7. The -ся passive and its limits
8. Impersonal and indefinite-personal constructions
9. Choosing a construction: meaning and register
10. Variation as a delta over the standard
11. Counts in the treebanks
12. Quick reference: voice in UD
13. How Mova handles it
14. Sources

Related chapters: participles and aspect in 13. Verbs; participles as relative alternatives in 25. Relative clauses; subjectless sentences in 21. Clause structure; negation of the -но/-то form and its spelling in 27. Negation; topic and focus in the choice of voice in 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure; official style in 37. Register and variation.

1. Overview: one event, six constructions

The event 'someone built the school last year' can be reported in all of the following ways; each is grammatical, and each has its own meaning and register:

Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. I) formulates the choice between the second and the fourth: when the speaker wants to put the weight on the subject (the thing affected), the participle construction is used (Байда замучений); when the weight is on the action itself, the subjectless -но/-то form (Байду замучено).

2. The passive participle: forms

2.1 Formation

The passive past participle is formed from the infinitive stem of transitive verbs, mostly perfective:

Imperfective passive participles exist (писаний, читаний, ношений, бачений) but are used mostly as adjectives (писаний закон 'written law'; ношений одяг 'worn clothes'). A present passive participle of the Russian type in -мий is not a living category: відомий 'known', рухомий 'movable', видимий 'visible' are adjectives.

2.2 Inflection and agreement

The participle declines like a hard adjective and agrees with its noun in gender, number and case: написаний лист, написана книжка, написане слово, написані листи; у написаній книжці. As a predicate it agrees with the subject: Лист написаний; Книжка написана.

2.3 The neuter in -не/-те versus the -но/-то form

The neuter singular of the participle ends in -не, -те (розбите вікно 'a broken window'; Вікно розбите 'The window is broken'); the -но/-то form (§4) ends in -но, -то (Вікно розбито 'The window has been broken'). They are different words with different syntax, and the orthography and the grammars warn against confusing them: Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. I, note) gives the error вставити шибку в це розбито вікно for розбите вікно.

3. The personal passive with the participle

3.1 Form

The participle is the predicate, with бути as copula: zero in the present, був/була/було/були in the past, буду…/буде in the future.

The present form describes a resultant state: Двері зачинені means the door is (in the state of being) shut, not that someone is shutting it; the process is the -ся form (Двері зачиняються).

3.2 With an agent

The agent can be added in the instrumental: Правка була відхилена комітетом 'The amendment was rejected by the committee' (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u184.p1.lang1.s2); Комітетом вона відхилена 'By the committee it has been rejected' (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u124.p3.lang1.s2); Інакше ми будемо прокляті нашими нащадками 'Otherwise we shall be cursed by our descendants' (ParlaMint-UA_2004-11-27-m0.u74.p15.lang1.s2). This is standard in writing, frequent in official texts and in parliamentary speech; for the purist objection and the alternatives see §5.

3.3 Participles as attributes

The participle is far more often an attribute than a predicate: закон, ухвалений парламентом 'a law adopted by parliament'; збудована школа 'the built school'. In the treebanks, amod accounts for 812 of 1,239 passive participles in IU and 431 of 914 in ParlaMint; see chapter 25, §12.

4. The -но/-то form

4.1 Form and meaning

The -но/-то form is made from the passive participle stem by the ending -о: написаний → написано, зроблений → зроблено, відкритий → відкрито, прийнятий → прийнято. It is used only as the predicate of a subjectless sentence, and it governs its object in the accusative:

• Листа написано. 'The letter has been written.' (листа: masc. acc. = gen. form for this noun)
• Хату збудовано. 'The house has been built.' (хату: fem. acc.)
• Роботу закінчено. 'The work is finished.'
• Під білою березою козаченька вбито. 'Under the white birch a young Cossack has been killed.' (folk song cited by Smerechynskyi 1932, ch. I)
• Рішення прийнято. 'The decision has been adopted.' (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u99.p6.lang1.s1)

Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. I) describes these forms as no longer participles but non-personal verb forms: neither gender nor number is felt in them, only pastness and completed action. He traces them through Old Ukrainian documents (ихъ обмовлено, 1534) and folk poetry, and notes that the corresponding Russian construction is rare, the Polish one (wzięto go, ścięto) widespread.

The object is a real accusative: an animate masculine noun takes the genitive-like accusative (козаченька вбито), a feminine noun the -у accusative (хату), and in UD it is obj. Neuter and inanimate masculine nouns are ambiguous between nominative and accusative (Рішення прийнято; Закон ухвалено), and the treebanks annotate them as obj too: of 197 -но/-то predicates in IU, 165 have an obj and none an nsubj; in ParlaMint 251 of 302 have an obj and 10 an nsubj (annotated where the noun is clearly nominative; all splits, UD 2.18, 2026-11-06). The most frequent single form in ParlaMint is прийнято (86), from the chair's Рішення прийнято.

4.2 Aspect and tense

The form is made almost only from perfective verbs (IU: 185 of 187 with an Aspect feature are perfective; ParlaMint all 209). Its meaning is past, often perfect: the action has been completed and its result holds. Imperfective forms (писано, говорено) are rare and literary-archaic: як раджено 'as had been advised' (Hrinchenko, cited by Smerechynskyi).

4.3 With було and буде

To place the result in the past or future, було or буде can be added: Рішення було прийнято 'The decision had been / was adopted'; Закон буде ухвалено 'The law will be adopted'. Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. I.1) held that the auxiliary was foreign to the folk language, a transfer of the Russian personal passive (было/будет сделано), and recommended the active (постанови видрукували), the personal passive (були видрукувані) or the bare form (видрукувано). Other grammarians of his time disagreed (he lists them), and the construction with було/буде is standard in the modern language: the 2019 orthography uses -но/-то forms freely and does not restrict the auxiliary. The treebanks show how established it is: an auxiliary or copula accompanies 57 of 197 -но/-то forms in IU (було 46, буде 10, бути 1) and 73 of 302 in ParlaMint (було 52, буде 18, бути 3). This is another place where the norm has moved with usage.

4.4 Restrictions

• Only from transitive verbs. There is no -но/-то form of -ся verbs: forms like ✗ звернено ся, ✗ зверненось 'it was turned to', found in Galician writing of the 1920s, were condemned as Polonisms (Smerechynskyi 1932, ch. III, note, citing Ohiienko); the standard says звернулися.
• No subject: ✗ Вікно було розбито with вікно as a nominative subject is, strictly, the confusion of §2.3; but because neuter nouns do not distinguish the cases, Вікно розбито is simply read with вікно as object.
• Negation is written apart: Праці не закінчено; Підлогу не вимито (2019 orthography, § 44.1.2). The object of a negated -но/-то form may be in the genitive (Праці не закінчено, gen.) or accusative (Роботу не закінчено), as with any negated transitive verb (chapter 27, §7).

4.5 Counts

UD 2.18, all splits, 2026-11-06. The treebanks tag the form as VERB with VerbForm=Fin|Mood=Ind|Person=0.

5. The agent: instrumental, від + genitive, or none

5.1 The purist position

The best-known prescriptive rule of Ukrainian syntax concerns the agent in the instrumental. Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. I.3–5), with Simovych, Kurylova and other grammarians of the 1920s whom he cites, held that:

1. The instrumental of the agent (ким? 'by whom?') with a passive participle, and above all with the subjectless -но/-то form, is foreign to the folk language: ✗ ці постанови ухвалено (ухвалені) XVI партз'їздом; the native construction is the active: ці постанови ухвалив XVI партз'їзд.
2. The -но/-то form implies an unnamed "someone did it" (German man); a named agent contradicts it, and the instrumental then reads as the instrument: листа переслано братом is understood in the folk language as 'someone sent the letter through the brother', not 'the brother sent it'.
3. The instrumental of the instrument or manner (чим?, як?) is free with all passives: Чим тебе порубано? 'What were you cut with?'
4. With participles and -ся verbs (not with -но/-то), the folk language has the agent in від + genitive: Заклята від рідної матері 'cursed by her own mother'; Будеш від нас бита 'You'll be beaten by us'. He notes, with Matviienko, that від marks the source rather than the doer (призначений від Раднаркому 'appointed from the Council of People's Commissars') and that replacing every instrumental agent with від produces odd or ambiguous sentences (вишні, посаджені від Миколи).
5. He quotes Novytskyi's view that the spread of passive constructions such as мною було усмотрено is a mark of bureaucratic language.

5.2 The present norm

Current grammars and style guides keep the recommendation as a stylistic one: in neutral and literary prose, prefer the active or an agentless -но/-то form; avoid an instrumental agent with -но/-то forms. The instrumental agent with a participle or a -ся verb (закон, ухвалений Верховною Радою; питання розглядається комітетом) is standard in official and scientific writing. The від + genitive agent survives in folk and poetic language and in fixed phrases; as a general substitute it sounds artificial.

5.3 What the treebanks show

Only ParlaMint uses the relation obl:agent. Its heads (UD 2.18, all splits, 2026-11-06):

The 27 -но/-то agents are exactly the construction the purist tradition rejects, and they are spoken by deputies and ministers in all periods covered (2003–2022), together with the National Security Council transcript of 2014 (нами з'ясовано домінуючу позицію цивільного населення Криму 'the dominant position of the civilian population of Crimea has been established by us', NSDC_UA_28_Feb2014-159). The pattern belongs to the official register and is usage the codified recommendation has not displaced. Another common type is the agent fronted as a topic: Судом доведено, що він винуватий 'It has been proved by the court that he is guilty' (ParlaMint-UA_2014-03-04-m0.u51.p2.lang1.s5).

IU, which has no obl:agent, has only 3 -но/-то forms with an animate instrumental dependent, a measure of how rare the agentive -но/-то is in its edited written texts.

6. Verbs in -ся: the readings

6.1 Form

The reflexive postfix -ся (after vowels also -сь: вмився/вмивсь) is written together with the verb (2019 orthography, § 44.2.3); it follows all endings: вмиваюся, вмиваєшся, вмивається; past вмивався, вмивалася; imperative вмивайся; infinitive вмиватися. In the third person present -ть + ся is written -ться and pronounced [-tsʲːa]. In the treebanks 2,462 of 12,901 IU verb tokens and 1,817 of 12,025 ParlaMint verb tokens end in -ся or -сь (19% and 15%); ParlaMint marks them with Reflex=Yes (1,815), IU does not use the feature on verbs.

6.2 The readings

Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. III) stresses that in the folk language most -ся verbs are active: the subject does the action "by itself". Дрова нарубалися і наклалися 'The firewood got chopped and stacked (by itself)' in a folk tale means the wood did it itself, not that someone chopped it. He explains this by the transparent meaning of -ся as себе: п'ється = 'drinks itself', 'goes down by itself'. The impersonal type with a dative (так їй там і спрялось і змоталось 'the spinning went so well for her there') is, in his words, the characteristic, "maximally widespread" Ukrainian construction.

6.3 Aspect

The passive reading of -ся is essentially imperfective: Будинок будується/будувався (process, habit). A perfective -ся verb with an inanimate subject is anticausative or result-oriented, not passive: Будинок збудувався means the house got built, with the agent out of view and a slightly folk or colloquial flavour; the perfective passive is the participle or the -но/-то form (Будинок збудовано).

7. The -ся passive and its limits

7.1 Inanimate subjects

The -ся passive is natural with inanimate subjects in descriptions of processes, procedures and habits: Тут продаються квіти 'Flowers are sold here'; Питання вирішується 'The question is being decided'; Закон приймається Верховною Радою 'Laws are adopted by the Verkhovna Rada' (official, with an agent). It is a mainstay of official and scientific language, where an agent in the instrumental is frequent (49 obl:agent with -ся heads in ParlaMint: Порядок денний формується на Погоджувальній раді тими, хто представляє більшість 'The agenda is formed in the Conciliation Council by those who represent the majority', ParlaMint-UA_2014-03-04-m0.u57.p2.lang1.s3).

7.2 Animate subjects: ambiguity and the purist objection

With an animate subject, a -ся verb is read reflexively or actively first, so the passive is ambiguous or odd: Діти розпускаються на канікули could mean the children "dissolve themselves". Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. III, Б.1) considered such personal -ся passives with animate subjects (Діти розпускаються на два місяці 'Children are let out for two months') a Russianism and recommended the active (Дітей розпускають) or the -но/-то form (Дітей розпущено). Style guides keep this advice.

7.3 Impersonal -ся with an accusative object

A subjectless -ся form with an accusative object (✗ Хату будується три роки 'The house (acc.) is being built for three years'; ✗ цю кашу їсться) is not standard. Smerechynskyi (ch. III, A.2) regarded it as a Polonism (cf. Polish buduje się dom, jadało się kaszę), current in Galician literary usage of his time; Tymchenko's grammar had listed хату будується. The standard says Хату будують or Хата будується.

8. Impersonal and indefinite-personal constructions

8.1 The third person plural

The commonest agentless construction in speech is the active verb in the third person plural with no subject, the indefinite-personal sentence: Кажуть, що… 'They say that…'; Тут продають квіти 'Flowers are sold here'; Його вбили на війні 'He was killed in the war'; Мене запросили 'I was invited'. The agent is unspecified people, not a definite вони. Smerechynskyi (ch. I.2) points out that a Russian passive он убит на войне is rendered in Ukrainian either by this 3pl construction or by the -но/-то form його вбито на війні, not by a personal passive.

8.2 The second person singular, generic

Без праці не виловиш і рибки з ставка 'Without effort you won't even catch a little fish from the pond': a generic 'you', common in proverbs and in instructions.

8.3 The impersonal neuter: an unknown force

A finite verb in the 3rd person singular (neuter in the past, -ло) with no subject expresses an event caused by an unknown or natural force; the force may appear in the instrumental: Блискавкою спалило хату 'Lightning burned the house'; Човен перекинуло хвилею 'The boat was overturned by a wave'; Його поранило 'He got wounded'; Дорогу замело 'The road got snowed over'. Smerechynskyi (1932, ch. II) describes the type as one the folk language "loves", with an agent conceived as a mysterious воно ('it'); his examples include Порох зайнявся, — і розірвало корчму, і їх побило 'The powder caught fire and the tavern was blown apart and they were killed'. The instrumental here is the instrument of the unnamed force, which is why it is acceptable where the instrumental of a person is not (§5.1). In UD the verb has no subject; the instrumental is obl.

9. Choosing a construction: meaning and register

The last row matters for translation from English: the English passive with a by-phrase is used to put the agent last as new information; Ukrainian does that with the active verb and object-first order (chapter 29): The school was built by the community = Школу збудувала громада.

10. Variation as a delta over the standard

11. Counts in the treebanks

UD 2.18, all splits, made with awk over the CoNLL-U files on 2026-11-06. Syntactic words.

The two treebanks share the morphology (Person=0, Voice=Pass), but only ParlaMint uses the passive subtypes nsubj:pass, aux:pass and obl:agent; IU marks a passive subject as plain nsubj and an agent as plain obl. A count of agents must therefore use features (an animate instrumental) for IU, as in §5.3.

12. Quick reference: voice in UD

13. How Mova handles it

13.1 In the fact extractor

The Ukrainian fact extractor (kg/src/uk.rs) has no notion of voice. What it does with each construction follows from its general rules: a finite verb (from VESUM) is the predicate; a nominative agreeing with it is the subject; бути, стати and other verbs in the COPULA list take a nominal part (predicate:nominal); other nouns become objects by case.

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

So the most characteristic Ukrainian passive, the -но/-то form, produces no fact at all; the four -ся readings produce identical facts; and an instrumental agent is an object. The facts are syntactic by design (kg — the Mova knowledge graph: "The roles are syntactic… Semantic roles come as the next layer"), so the last two are within the stated scope, the first is a coverage gap.

13.2 In the grammar code and the generator

The 4-byte grammar code (kg/src/gram.rs) has fields for part of speech, case, number, gender, person, tense/form, aspect, animacy and degree, and flags for pronoun, proper name, negation and implicit member; it has no voice field. The generator (kg/src/textgen.rs) restores forms from lemma and code through VESUM, so it can regenerate будується or написаний from a fact, but it cannot choose between active, -ся, participle and -но/-то renderings of one event.

13.3 Not yet

• No -но/-то predicate: the form needs a rule like the verbal one, with an accusative object and no subject.
• No voice or diathesis layer: no mapping of a passive subject to a patient, of an instrumental agent to an agent, or of the four -ся readings to different roles.
• No Ukrainian dependency parser or UD baseline (tools/mova-parse has no Ukrainian model; langseg is Latin-only; What every language gets has no Ukrainian row, 2026-11-06). The pragmatic voice label in prag/src/schema.rs is a narrative-voice field (narrator, character, none: who is speaking), read for English, not grammatical voice.
• No register signal from agentive -но/-то or instrumental agents, though §5.3 shows they mark official speech.

14. Sources

• Smerechynskyi, Serhii. 1932. Нариси з української синтакси. Ch. I (subjectless -но/-то sentences; the auxiliary; the instrumental agent; від + genitive), ch. II (impersonal constructions with an unknown force), ch. III (-ся constructions: native and non-native types). smerechynskyi-1932-narysy-z-ukrainskoi-syntaksy (public domain in UA/EU).
• Український правопис. 2019. § 44 (не with -но/-то forms and participles; -ся/-сь written together). ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019 (official document).
• 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): the treebank's design and its annotation of spoken features.
• UD Ukrainian ParlaMint 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0): sentences cited by sent_id (including the NSDC 2014 transcript); counts. UD Ukrainian IU 2.18 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0): counts only. All 2026-11-06.
• Mova: kg/src/uk.rs, kg/src/gram.rs, kg/src/textgen.rs, kg — the Mova knowledge graph, prag/src/schema.rs, What every language gets.

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