Table 1 shows that Dutch has three overt articles: two definite, de and het, and one indefinite, een. The definite articles are sensitive to gender and number distinctions: de is used with singular non-neuter and plural nouns, while the definite article het is used with singular neuter nouns. These two definite articles can also be used with non-count nouns. The indefinite article een is sensitive to number only; it usually occurs only with singular count nouns. It has therefore been proposed that it has a phonetically empty plural/non-count counterpart, represented by “∅” in the table. That we are dealing with a null form is also supported by the fact that both een and ∅ have a negative counterpart, which in both cases is geenno.

The definite and indefinite articles (de/het/een) are usually pronounced with a schwa (/ə/). Moreover, the initial consonant of the neuter definite article het is usually not pronounced. The weak (phonologically reduced) form of het can be orthographically represented by the apostrophe notation (cf. ’t), which is also available for the indefinite article een (cf. ’n). In careful speech (“officialese” and the like) or when the article is stressed, the neuter definite article can be pronounced as [hεt]; the indefinite article een can be pronounced with a full vowel [e:], and is then homophonous with the numeral éénone. The negative article geenno differs from the indefinite article een in that it cannot be pronounced with schwa, but is always pronounced with the full vowel [e:]. This may not be a coincidence, since we will see in Section 19.1.5 that geen is probably not an article but a cardinal numeral or a quantifier; cf. also Van der Toorn (1981:§5.75).

Unlike the German articles, the Dutch articles do not decline; apart from some historical relics, their form is invariant in all syntactic environments. This is shown for the definite non-neuter article de in the primeless examples in (6), but the same holds for the other articles. The primed examples give the German translations of the Dutch examples for comparison.

According to the DP structure of noun phrases in (1), the article is the syntactic head of the noun phrase, and as such is responsible for several semantic (and syntactic) properties of the noun phrase as a whole. These semantic properties of definite and indefinite articles are discussed in Section 19.1.1. Section 19.1.2 discusses noun phrases that normally do not contain an article, such as noun phrases consisting of a proper noun; in this section, special emphasis is placed on those cases that exceptionally license an article. Section 19.1.3 continues with a brief discussion of definite articles with acronyms and abbreviations, and Section 19.1.4 discusses articles with deviant semantics. Section 19.1.5 is entirely devoted to the negative article/quantifier geen: this is motivated by the fact that geen has several properties related to negation and quantification that set it apart from the other articles.