I have a language question! from the previous article: What is ‘this’ doing in the following sentence? "[P]art of the value of the home is this space of purity that's protected from the pollutedness of the world, a place where you express values like simplicity, humility, modesty, grace. . ."
To distill that, the phrase is: "Part of the value of the home is this space of purity." We hear this all the time, and I use it a lot myself. She's not referring to something tangible close by; it's more like she's gesturing at that value of the home. It seems to me a stab at characterizing the 'space' more specifically than just any space of purity—but there's no real information there. It seems she's egging the listener to nod in assent, as if remembering, "Yeah, I think I know that space." Any linguist out there know what's going on here?
I hope Ms. Bell doesn't mind being the fall guy for my criticisms. It's nothing personal, you understand. I inspect because I love. What she's doing.
I'm not a linguist, but I play one on the Internet.
This practice of using 'this' rather than 'the' as the article in a noun phrase helps to tie the specific concept more closely to the context of the discussion. It identifies the noun phrase as the particular one of note, and can help to avoid ambiguiity in anaphoric relationships.
For example if you have two sentences, "The foo blah blah blah, the bar woof woof woof. It yak yak yak," using 'this' as the article pins down which NP 'it' refers to in the previous sentence.
Interesting. So "this" is an uber-article, calling out the most-special thing of several subjects? "An apple" is just any old apple; "The apple" is the one we care about, for some reason. "This... apple" is the critically insightful apple of the whole paragraph.
It's a bit strange that we Romance speakers have articles at all. I wish I knew better how Japanese handles this⋐this ability to highlight particular noun phrases. (Good usage of this "this"?)