Having established a provisional (and clearly less than satisfactory) conception of what definiteness is, and with a picture of the kinds of determiner and noun phrase that are central to an understanding of definiteness, we are now in a position to survey the languages of the world to see how the definite–indefinite distinction is expressed. We begin this survey in this chapter by examining what I have called “simple” definite and indefinite noun phrases. These are noun phrases which correspond in terms of what they express, if approximately, to English noun phrases in which [± Def] is signalled by, at most, one of the articles the, a, sm. In the next chapter we will extend this survey to “complex” definites and indefinites. Bear in mind that the term “article” is being used here informally, to mean any linguistic form which has as its central function to encode a value of [± Def] (or [± Sg] in the case of cardinal articles). It thus covers aaxal definiteness markers as well as free-form determiners. On the basis of what we have seen in English, we may expect articles more widely to act as default members of larger categories of definite or indefinite expressions, to be obligatory (except perhaps under certain generally specifiable conditions) in the absence of other such expressions, and to be unstressed and perhaps phonologically weak. We will in fact see that these expectations do carry over to many languages, but that they cannot all be taken as universal properties of articles.