Consider the pragmatic use of the English word 'certain' – i.e. 'A certain woman came to the shop yesterday and asked for ...'. In this case, 'a certain' signals that the man will reappear in the discourse, and that he's probably rather significant for the whole speech act – he's a sort of discourse topic. From this point on, references to this 'certain woman' will be definite (or even pronominal).
Like English, Finnish does the same with an adjective (or borderline determiner), eräs. In Swedish, it's not unusual for a noun with similar properties with regards to the context to be introduced by an existential construction with det as a sort of extra empty formal subject:
det kom en kvinna till affären igår och frågade efter ...
it came a woman to store-DEF yesterday and asked for ...
This is not the only time det can be used as a formal subject, especially not with existential verbs - and this is not the only time existential verbs are used. However, this is one circumstance in which it's used. Of course, existential verbs are exclusively intransitive in Swedish, (and in most languages), so this restricts some stuff. However, let's come up with a twist!
Let's entirely extract the thing that identifies that we're introducing a discourse topic from the noun phrase and make a verb whose sole function is to signal 'hey, the subject is significant'. Let's use certain as a verb in the glosses.
a woman certains. she came to the store yesterday and asked for ...
This seems a bit clunky. So, let's turn certain into an auxiliary!
a woman certained come to the store yesterday and ask for ...
After this first sentence, there's no need to use that verb until we establish a new discourse topic. However, if the discussion has gotten a bit lost, the verb can be used with the right congruence and with a dropped subject to recall that the discourse topic indeed is this referent.
What if he is not the subject? Well, voice stuff could help there, but I am also partial to resumptive pronouns.
a man certained police catch him yesterday.
Of course, this pronoun might seem rather useless in the first or second person, generally speaking, so maybe first and second person markers in the subject spot of it would signify something along the lines of the topic being the object (or oblique argument) with first or second person subjects? Maybe passives have a special meaning with that verb, whereby first or second person passives on it signify that the topic acted on the first or second person.
a man was-1sg certained beat at chess yesterday
man certain-1sg-pass beat.inf at chess yesterday
a certain man beat me at chess yesterday
This would create an interesting way of referring to the discourse topic by "pronoun-like verbs" at times, whereas other nouns would be referred to by "noun-like pronouns" as well as "pronoun-like suffixes". What makes 'certain' be verbal in this, of course, is the suffixes it can take and its syntactical distribution as compared to other verbs and particularly auxiliary verbs in the language.
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