The article grounds the relevance of the regularities of the construction of sentence structure in accordance with the peculiarities of word order with the help of intonation, the speaker’s communicative intent, and the grammatical laws of the Ukrainian language. The main attention is focused on the fact that the interpretation of the sen-tence order of the Ukrainian language as fl uent seems to be incorrect. It is ap-propriate to use the concept of «direct word order» and «indirect word order» (inverse word order»). The origins of the formation and development of the outlined concepts date back to the birth of the formal-grammatical paradigm of language research (Ivan Ohiienko’s reasoning), which later received a broader interpretation in the communicative paradigm (the modern stage of the develop-ment of the Ukrainian language).The following conceptual provisions regarding the given issue are high-lighted in Ivan Ohiienko’s linguistic legacy: all syntactic components of a sen-tence are assigned a certain place in a sentence, the position of sentence compo-nents is caused by the intonation of the speaker and the grammatical laws of the Ukrainian language, inversion is a stylistic aspect of using an unusual word or-der. In addition, the linguist points out such grammatical categories and concepts as valence («words are paired»), semantic approach («the meaning of a word in a sentence»), the identifi cation of grammatical features of the Ukrainian language (the change in the semantic and syntactic meaning of a word according to its place in a sentence). All these testify to the linguistic talent of Ivan Ohiienko and the fact that the linguist was ahead of his time.The linguist pointed out the melodiousness of the Ukrainian language. In the linguist’s opinion, inversion is ordinary and unusual. Ivan Ohiienko believes that ordinary inversion is used only in artistic speech, while unusual inversion should be eradicated from speech. The linguist proved the limited possibilities of a logical approach to the analysis of syntactic units, and thus substantiated the formal-grammatical paradigm