pronouns - Using "this" as an indefinite article


I am not a native speaker myself and would like to inquire about a particular usage of "this".


Here's an example from the Corpus of Contemporary American English http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ : "Anyway, the first mistake I made was I thought the finger bowl was the soup. So I went to get my spoon and to go to the finger bowl and this lady nicely said, that's not the soup. I said, oh, OK.".


My question is: how is "this" understood in the context above (highlighted with bold)? It seems, from the broader context, that it occurs for the first time in the narration, so is it correct that it can be substituted with "a/an" in this context? How frequent is this phenomenon? Is there a special condition for using "this" in that way in narration?




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