I have been reading the novel Bad for You for the last ten days. I have read a small sentence and in the small sentence a small phrase did not sound natural to my ears. So I landed here to get some help on it.
Bad for You
I shook my head as I stared at him, confused. Krit didn’t get up at
ten ever. He partied all night and slept most of the day.“Good. There’s this place I know that has incredible pancakes, and I
want some pancakes,” he said then nodded toward the stairs leading
down to the parking lot. “Come on. Eat breakfast with me.”
My question is that does it (There’s this place) sound natural? I think it could be (there is a place, there is the place but there is this place does not sound natural or maybe not good) one of them. Maybe it is grammatically right or also making sense but not to me (a non-native English speaker) at the moment. Because there shows that something is away from us and this shows something is nearby us. So using there and this together not sounding right to me.
Best Answer
You correctly understand that this use of this is not Standard, and is not employed in formal discourse; and I agree with you that the demonstrative pronoun jars in this context, whether you understand there as a dummy pronoun or a demonstrative pro-adverb.
The fact is that this is used here not as a demonstrative but as a sort of article with something of the senses of both the and a. You might think of it as an ‘introductory definite’ article: speakers say this NOUN when they have a specific instance of NOUN in mind which has not yet been introduced into the discourse.
He’s not a guy who’s actually present and I’m pointing to, but he’s not just any guy, either, he’s not just one of several guys I know who can fix things, he’s a very particular guy whose services I’m recommending.
This is a very common colloquial use, and it is ‘non-Standard’ rather than ‘sub-Standard’: you might very well hear English professors use it in conversation: