Oto słowo oto: oto jak opisałbym tę oto jednostkę tekstową
Here you are: that’s the word oto – and that’s how to grasp it. That’s it!

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, syntactic properties of the word oto ‘here; there; over hear; over there’ are examined. The account proposed is purely distributional, not semantic. The word, regarded traditionally as a particle by Polish lexicographers, used to appear also in contexts that hardly meet this interpretation. Following Inny słownik języka polskiego (A different dictionary of Polish), Warsaw 2000, by Mirosław Bańko, the newest Polish dictionary in which the item is treated more carefully, it is argued that two different lexical items should be distinguished. Examination of the data of the IPI PAN Corpus made it possible to confirm the account, as well as to strengthen it. Except cases of freely omissible tokens that represent the lexical unit OTO2 (particle), the word oto may precede the Nominative NP or the indirect WH-question. On this basis, a predicative OTO1 should be introduced. It has a two dimensional (tense: present, mood: indicative) and one-word paradigm. It subcategorises for the noun phrase in Nominative, as in Oto on! ‘There he is!’, or for the indirect question, as in A oto co powinien zrobić. ‘That’s what he should do.’ Finally, the particle OTO2 often follows the demonstrative pronouns TEN ‘this’, TAKI ‘such’, TAK ‘this way’, and TYLE ‘as much as’, and collocations such as ten oto, takiego oto, tak oto, tylu oto are to be included in the lexical entries for TEN, TAKI, TAK, and TYLE.

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