🗣️ 32. Politeness and hedging

Politeness is how speakers protect each other's face — the wish to be approved of and the wish not to be imposed on — while still asking, refusing, criticising. Hedging is how they weaken their commitment to what they say. Ukrainian does both with grammatical choices English does not have: the polite plural Ви (capitalised in letters), the vocative of address with пане, пані, друже or the name and patronymic, diminutives that make an imposition small (хвилинку, водички), aspect (the imperfective imperative of invitation), the conditional би, and a set of hedging words — мабуть, напевно, здається, ніби, нібито, може, типу. This chapter describes the forms and their social rules, measures them in UD 2.18 Ukrainian treebanks and in the Leipzig news corpus (2026-11-06), gives the varietal and generational deltas over the literary standard, and says what Mova reads: no Ukrainian politeness or hedge feature exists yet; the fact extractor rejects every vocative and every parenthetical hedge because of the comma.

Contents

1. Face, strategies and the Ukrainian means
2. Ти and Ви
3. The capital Ви in writing
4. Address: the vocative and its forms
5. Name and patronymic, пане, пані, друже
6. Diminutives as politeness
7. Softening a request: aspect, би, minimisers
8. Hedges: мабуть, напевно, здається, ніби, типу
9. Boosters and the absence of hedging
10. Impoliteness
11. Deltas by region, generation and style
12. How Mova handles it
13. Sources

Related chapters: the vocative's endings in 11. Nouns; personal pronouns in 12. Pronouns, determiners and numerals; diminutive suffixes in 17. Derivation: suffixes; requests in 31. Speech acts; register in 37. Register and variation; the English chapter 32. Politeness and hedging for Brown and Levinson's model and Lakoff's hedges.

1. Face, strategies and the Ukrainian means

Brown and Levinson's model (described in the English chapter) distinguishes positive face (the wish to be liked and included) and negative face (the wish to be free from imposition), and orders the strategies for a face-threatening act: bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, off record, or not doing the act. The Ukrainian means map onto them:

2. Ти and Ви

2.1 The rule

Ти (ty) is the singular of intimacy and equality; ви (vy), the plural, is also the polite singular. Ти goes to family members (traditionally not to parents, §2.3), children, friends, close colleagues of one's own age, animals, God and the saints in prayer (Отче наш, що єси на небесах…), and the personified nation or land in poetry (Україно! … ти). Ви goes to strangers, older people, superiors, officials, customers, teachers. The switch from ви to ти is negotiated (Давай на «ти»? 'Shall we say ти?'); the older or higher person usually offers it.

2.2 Agreement with polite Ви

The verb agrees with the pronoun, the nominal predicate with the person: the common usage, also in the press and in fiction, is Ви такий добрий to a man and Ви така добра to a woman; the plural adjective (Ви такі добрі) is understood as plural address or as more formal.

2.3 Ви to parents

Traditional Ukrainian usage, especially in villages and among older generations, addresses parents and grandparents with ви while they answer with ти: Мамо, ви вже поїли? 'Mum, have you eaten yet?'. The asymmetry expresses filial respect, not distance; it is one of the clearest differences from Russian and from English. Urban and younger speakers more often use ти to their parents. The corpora show both: in the 40 characters after an address to a parent or grandparent (мамо, тату, матусю, бабо, бабусю, діду, дідусю followed by a comma or !) Brown-UK has 3 forms of ви and 3 of ти, the Leipzig news corpus 3 of ви and 14 of ти (counted 2026-11-06; small numbers, quoted speech only). The written press of 2024, then, has mostly the urban ти; fiction, which quotes village speech, keeps the traditional ви.

2.4 In the treebanks

Forms of the second person plural pronoun (ви, вам, вас, вами) and the possessive (ваш…), counted by first letter case in all positions (UD 2.18, 2026-11-06):

These counts include sentence-initial forms. The parliamentary transcript writes ви lowercase in most of its Ви-addresses to one deputy, which follows the orthography (§3): a transcript is not a letter. IU's high share of capitals comes from letters and comments addressed to one reader.

3. The capital Ви in writing

The 2019 orthography (ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019, § 60.2) prescribes the capital Ви, Ваш "as a form of politeness in addressing one particular person in letters, official documents and the like": Повідомляємо Вам…, Вітаємо Вас…, у відповідь на Ваш запит…. In addresses to several people, in fiction and in quoted dialogue the pronoun is lowercase.

What the corpora show (mid-sentence forms only, i.e. after a letter or a comma and a space, 2026-11-06):

News capitalises Ви in interviews (journalist to guest), letters and appeals to readers; elsewhere, including generic ви 'one', it is lowercase, as the rule requires. Usage beyond the rule: commercial and online texts capitalise Ви to every customer, even in mass mailings, which the rule (one particular person) does not cover; it is the norm of customer service rather than of the orthography.

4. Address: the vocative and its forms

4.1 The vocative is the norm

Ukrainian addresses in the vocative case (chapter 11. Nouns for the endings): Іване!, Маріє!, Олено!, мамо!, тату!, друже!, брате!, колего!, пане!, сину!, доню!. The orthography (§ 74 n. 1–2, § 87 n. 1–4) requires the vocative in every inflected word of a compound address: Оксано Іванівно, Ярославе Андрійовичу, пане лейтенанте, друже Грицю, колего Степане, пані Гаркуше (with the feminine пані, which does not inflect, the surname takes the vocative). The vocative is neutral, not solemn: it is the ordinary way to call a child, a friend or a colleague.

4.2 Usage: the nominative of address

In speech the nominative is also used for address, particularly with first names and name-plus-patronymic. Heads of the UD vocative relation, all splits, counted 2026-11-06:

Common nouns of address (колеги, пане, друже, депутате) are in the vocative 98% of the time in parliament; proper names are more often nominative (61%). The ParlaMint treebank shows both side by side: Вибачте, Олександре Валентиновичу (NSDC_UA_28_Feb2014-383) against Дякую, Тарас Іванович (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u93.p1.lang1.s1) and Іван Олександрович, не стрибайте по залі (ParlaMint-UA_2004-11-27-m0.u23.p17.lang1.s3) 'Ivan Oleksandrovych, don't jump around the hall'. The treebank's authors (shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian) parsed 88 million tokens of Rada transcripts (1990–2024) and found more than 128 thousand vocative contexts, with large variation between the cases that depends on the lemma; they observe that "the modern norm recommends only the vocative" while practice varies. The nominative of address with a name and patronymic is a spoken habit shared with Russian; it is not codified, and in writing (letters, official addresses) the vocative stands.

The nominative is also normal for nouns without a distinct vocative (plurals: Шановні колеги!; indeclinable пані, foreign names), and in the vocative-nominative compromise пане + nominative surname (Пане Кушнарьов, ParlaMint-UA_2004-11-27-m0.u42.p6.lang1.s1), frequent in speech.

5. Name and patronymic, пане, пані, друже

In ParlaMint the most frequent addressees in the vocative relation are колега (421), депутат (85), Володимир (38), пан (37), Олександр (28), друг (20) (2026-11-06). Пане + title has replaced the Soviet товаришу + title in official life; the address by name and patronymic remains the respectful norm between colleagues of the older generations and in schools, beside the newer пане/пані.

Feminine titles: current usage forms feminine nouns of profession (міністерка, директорка, професорка), which the 2019 orthography describes (§ 32.4: авторка, директорка, редакторка); in address пані директорко, пані професорко are now common in media and universities, while пані директоре (masculine title for a woman) remains in older official usage. Synchak and Starko (2022, synchak-2022-feminine-dictionaries) document how online dictionaries and corpora have recorded the growing set of feminine personal nouns. Here usage moved first and the orthography of 2019 caught up.

6. Diminutives as politeness

Simovych (1919, simovych-1919-hramatyka-ukrainskoi-movy-dlia, § 112) observed that Ukrainians use diminutive and affectionate forms "very gladly and on every occasion", not only to children, in love or in grief, but in ordinary talk. In politeness they do two jobs:

1. Minimising the imposition (negative politeness): Зачекайте хвилинку 'Wait a moment (dim.)', Одну секундочку 'Just a second', Можна водички? 'Could I have a little water?', Ще шматочок? 'Another little piece?', Підпишіть тут, будь ласка, і ще тут, трішки нижче 'Sign here, please, and here, a little (dim.) lower'. The thing asked for is made small, so the request is.
2. Warmth and hospitality (positive politeness): Сідайте, ось вам чайку, варення 'Sit down, here's some tea (dim.) for you', Пригощайтеся, пиріжечки свіжі 'Help yourselves, the little pies are fresh', Доню, синочку to a young stranger.

The diminutive of minimisation is not childish and not limited to private life. In the parliamentary treebank the chair asks for time with diminutives: одну секундочку, одну хвилинку, одну хвилиночку 17 times against одну секунду, одну хвилину twice (ParlaMint, all splits, 2026-11-06), e.g. Одну секундочку, колеги, будь ласка, не розходьтесь, бо ми зараз будемо голосувати (ParlaMint-UA_2022-01-25-m0.u197.p4.lang1.s1). In the news corpus хвилинку (17), хвилиночку (7), секундочку (4), водички (5), чайку (2) occur in quoted speech; the minimisers трішки (325) and трошки (259) beside neutral трохи (2,676) (Leipzig news 2024, 2026-11-06).

Limits: diminutives of the addressee (Іванку, Оленко) or of their belongings to a stranger or superior can sound condescending; a diminutive of the topic of criticism makes it ironic (Ну й проєктик ви подали 'Quite a little project you've submitted', chapter 34).

7. Softening a request: aspect, би, minimisers

The perfective/imperfective choice is the most Ukrainian of these. Сідайте to a guest says the act is expected and welcome; Сядьте says it is required now, and is used by a teacher, a doctor or a police officer. Беріть! offers food; Візьміть asks someone to take a specific thing (chapter 31 §5).

8. Hedges: мабуть, напевно, здається, ніби, типу

8.1 The inventory

Hedges weaken the speaker's commitment to the truth (shields) or loosen the fit of a word (approximators), in Prince et al.'s terms used in the English chapter.

8.2 Syntax

Most hedges are parenthetical words (вставні слова) and are set off by commas (Він, мабуть, спить); UD Ukrainian attaches them as discourse or parataxis, sometimes as advmod. Ніби, наче, мов are also comparative conjunctions (mark in UD: ніби 14 times as mark in IU) and enter the comparison system (chapter 24). Здається is a verb form (3 sg of здаватися 'seem') used parenthetically, and the full clause мені здається, що… is a matrix clause with a complement (ccomp).

Attachment of the hedges in the treebanks (all splits, 2026-11-06):

The two treebanks annotate the same parenthetical words differently (IU mostly discourse, ParlaMint mostly parataxis); a model trained on one and evaluated on the other will lose points on these words for reasons that are not grammatical.

8.3 Frequency

Word counts, Leipzig news 2024 (14.2 M words, case-insensitive, 2026-11-06): можливо 3,031, нібито 3,226, здається 1,149, начебто 743, ніби 708, напевно 607 (+ напевне 45), мабуть 562, вочевидь 252, певно 56, либонь 3. The news register prefers можливо (the impersonal possibility) and the reportative нібито (distance from a claim) over the personal мабуть. In parliamentary speech the colloquial може dominates (166 tokens of може, many of them the verb 'can'; здається 21, мабуть 9, напевно 7, нібито 6; ParlaMint text, 2026-11-06). Типу is ambiguous with the genitive of тип 'type' (2,184 in the news corpus, nearly all the noun); as a hedge it is colloquial and young (Він типу такий крутий 'He's, like, so cool') and comes from Russian типа; the surzhyk spelling тіпа keeps the Russian pronunciation (chapter 37).

9. Boosters and the absence of hedging

Boosters strengthen commitment: звичайно 'of course', безперечно 'undoubtedly', справді 'really', звісно 'naturally', авжеж 'certainly', ще б пак 'and how', точно 'definitely', таки (counter-expectation), ж (shared knowledge), адже (known reason). A Ukrainian boosting particle often does the work of English emphatic do: Я ж казав! 'I did tell you!'. Overuse of звичайно in answers can sound condescending ('obviously'), as English of course can.

10. Impoliteness

Korotenko and Kyslyi (2026, korotenko-2026-two-axis-framework-analyzing-ukrainian) separate relational conduct (respect, engagement, conflict handling) from substantive contribution in Ukrainian online discussions (Telegram channels and a news forum): annotators agreed better when the two were scored separately, and comments can be rude but substantive or polite but empty. Politeness and impoliteness are on the first axis only.

11. Deltas by region, generation and style

Each row lists what changes against the literary standard of §§2–8; everything else holds.

The rows on generation are tendencies observed in usage, not rules; the treebank and corpus counts of §§2–8 support the parliamentary, news and nominative-of-address rows.

12. How Mova handles it

12.1 Politeness and hedges in prag and world: English only

• The sentence label hedge (0/1) is part of the closed schema (prag/src/schema.rs); the feature that sets it is the first hedge found in the cue list prag/data/cues.tsv, 34 English entries (maybe, perhaps, probably, i think, it seems, sort of, kind of …). No Ukrainian hedge is listed.
• The politeness strategies of the dialogue layer (politeness in world/src/talk.rs, weights after Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. 2013) match English strings: thank, please, sorry, could you, would you, by the way; the greeting/leave-taking classifier som_kind and the indirect-request reader indirect_request likewise.
• Nothing in prag or world distinguishes ти from Ви or reads the vocative, a diminutive or aspect.

12.2 The Ukrainian fact extractor

kg (kg/src/uk.rs) reads the grammar that carries politeness — the plural of Ви, the dative of дякувати, the imperative's aspect — but no politeness meaning. Its punctuation gate rejects every sentence with a comma, so every vocative and every comma-delimited hedge is out of reach. Measured 2026-11-06 (CPU, kg parse, worktree commit ac9a23149, VESUM, empty name list):

12.3 Not there yet

• No Ukrainian hedge or politeness lexicon; no hedge label for Ukrainian.
• No reading of ти/Ви, of the capital Ви, of the vocative or the nominative of address, of name and patronymic, of пане/пані.
• No link from a diminutive to its base and its politeness or irony value.
• No aspect-based politeness (imperfective of invitation).
• The conditional б/би is kept as a particle but not as a mood in the fact.
• The kg comma gate excludes vocatives and parenthetical hedges; lifting it requires a treatment of parentheticals and address that kg does not have.

13. Sources

• Український правопис. 2019. § 32.4 (feminine personal nouns), § 60.2 (capital Ви), § 74 n. 1–2 and § 87 n. 1–4 (vocative in compound addresses). ukrainskyi-pravopys-2019 (official text)
• Simovych, Vasyl. 1919. Граматика української мови… § 112 (diminutives). simovych-1919-hramatyka-ukrainskoi-movy-dlia (public domain)
• Shvedova, M., Lukashevskyi, A., Rysin, A. 2025. Developing a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Ukrainian Parliamentary Speech. UNLP. shvedova-2025-developing-universal-dependencies-treebank-ukrainian (CC BY 4.0)
• Synchak, O., Starko, V. 2022. Ukrainian Feminine Personal Nouns in Online Dictionaries and Corpora. COLINS. synchak-2022-feminine-dictionaries (CC BY 4.0)
• Korotenko, A., Kyslyi, R. 2026. A Two-Axis Framework for Analyzing Ukrainian Dialogues. UNLP. korotenko-2026-two-axis-framework-analyzing-ukrainian (CC BY 4.0)
• UD Ukrainian-ParlaMint 2.18 (CC BY-SA 4.0): quoted by sent_id; counts. UD Ukrainian-IU 2.18 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0): counts only. Counted 2026-11-06 with awk over all splits.
• Leipzig Corpora Collection, Ukrainian news 2024 (CC BY): counts with grep, 2026-11-06. Brown-UK (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0): counts only.
• Brown, P., Levinson, S. 1987; Prince, Frader & Bosk 1982; Lakoff 1973; Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. 2013: as described in the English chapter and in world/src/talk.rs; not read for this chapter.
• Mova: prag/src/schema.rs, prag/data/cues.tsv, prag/src/feats.rs, world/src/talk.rs, kg/src/uk.rs.
• The English counterpart: 32. Politeness and hedging.

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