Kozina J. The origin of the animate/ inanimate category in the Ukrainian language

This research focuses on revealing main tendencies and regularities of animate/inanimate category formation during the writing history of the Ukrainian language. It is revealed that the old form of the Accusative case was replaced by the homonymous form of the Genitive case as the main means of marking the being names on the grammatical level of the language. The study provides the analysis of the factors that influenced the choice of the Accusative form in different lexico-grammatical groups of substantives in the language of Old Russian Ukrainian and Middle Ukrainian periods. The causes of deviations from successive grammatical expression of animate/inanimate meaning in Modern Ukrainian are revealed.