Abstract: When comparing the use of the indefinite article in French and German one realizes that there is a fundamental difference between the two languages. All French nouns have a plural and combine with the three indefinite articles un, du and des, whereas in German the semantics of the noun is reflected in the possibility of having a plural and of combining with the indefinite article.This paper proposes as an explanation of this difference the indefinite articles in French constitute a system of classifiers, which classify noun phrases as either homo- or heterogeneous, and thereby establish their extension, whereas the only indefinite article in Germanis a quantifier that operates on the semantic make-up of the noun (its intension).
