Russian case and gender agreement (evening run)

What this example shows

The Russian sentence Vecherom ya pobejala v magazin means “In the evening I ran to the store”. Russian marks grammatical roles with endings rather than word order, and this one short clause shows three at once: an instrumental time word, a past tense that agrees with a feminine subject, and an object after a preposition.

Endings that carry the grammar

Three words carry the inflection:

Vecher-om evening-INS

The instrumental ending turns “evening” into “in the evening”, a time expression without a separate preposition.

pobeja-la run.PFV-PST.FEM

The verb “ran”, completed, with a past-tense ending that agrees with a feminine subject.

magazin store

The destination, “store”, after the preposition v (“to”).

Agreement and reordering

The past-tense ending -la tells you the speaker is feminine, information English carries nowhere in the sentence. The instrumental ending replaces an English preposition, and the free translation reorders the parts so the English reads naturally. Because the gloss line follows the Russian order and the translation does not, the connectors show which English words answer to which Russian endings.

Glossing conventions used here

INS marks the instrumental case, PST the past, and FEM feminine agreement. A period inside a label, as in PST.FEM, joins meanings that one ending carries together, and a hyphen separates the stem from the ending.

For the case and tense labels:

• glossing abbreviations cheat sheet

Recreate it in the editor

Open the example, set the morpheme boundary character under Settings → Tokens to split each stem from its ending, and add an English free-translation line below the gloss. Export the diagram as PNG, SVG, or PDF for a grammar lesson.

See also

Related examples:

• Turkish case and verb morphology shows case and person on another agglutinative clause.
• German umlaut plural shows case and number agreement in German.