Zero article

A zero article /zɪərəʊ ɑ:tɪkəl/ is a grammatical article that is envisioned to be present in English when a noun is not preceded by a determiner (including indefinite articles a/an or the definite article the); i.e. the determiner syntactic slot is empty.

There are actually three different articles in English that are null in form:

Article	Example	Notes
Null plural indefinite article	∅ Cats are cute.	This is the plural form of the indefinite article.
Null mass article	It contains ∅ water.	Used with mass nouns, in the absence of other determiners.
Null definite article	I play ∅ football.

Meaning

In English, we oftne use these zero articles when speaking about things in general. For example, in [∅] People eat [∅] cereal for [∅] breakfast, people refers to “people in general” and cereal refers to “cereal in general,” and breakfast refers to “breakfast in general.”

Form

Grammatically, the articles marks both lack of possession and lack of definiteness. The zero article is used with both singular or plural nouns. Singular nouns are marked as mass nouns, e.g: [∅] Fruit is good for you. It can also be used with plural nouns, e.g: [∅] Oranges are [∅] fruits., including uncountable plurals, e.g. [∅] Clothes are optional.

English pronouns do not take determiners; therefore, there is no zero article before pronouns; e.g. Somebody is happy, not *[∅] Somebody is happy. — including temporal deictic pronouns; Yesterday was rainy not *[∅] Yesterday was rainy.

In some analyses there may be a zero article before most (but not all) proper nouns, e.g. [∅] Caroline lives in [∅] France (not e.g. *The Caroline lives in the France). Other analyses omit a zero article, and group most proper nouns in a group closer to pronouns, which cannot take determiners.

Zero articles may be displaced by other articles, including:

• Demonstrative determiners and possessive determiners.
• Genitive case nouns, e.g. Dave’s cat.
• Quantifiers, e.g. some people.