ABSTRACT
The definite, the indefinite and the partitive article can be regarded as sub-classes of the French article. One of the purposes of this chapter is to give a morphological description of the French article system. Recently, it has been pointed out that making reference has to be considered as an activity of the speaker and that articles only play a minor part in the meaning of a noun phrase. The language under investigation is mostly English, although a few papers deal with French and German, and, to a lesser extent, with Dutch, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. The selection of one sub-class depends on certain referential-semantic, text-linguistic and pragmatic factors. As the author said above, it has often been stated that the definite article defines, specifies or individualises the following noun or creates a textual coherence. The relationship between the above-mentioned types of noun phrases is illustrated by the following tree diagram.
