The indefinite article occupies an important position in the article system in French and Spanish. We examine the syntactic distribution of the indefinite article in the corpus (a French text and its Spanish translation, a Spanish text and its French translation, and the French and Spanish translations of an Italian text), taking into account the distributional correspondence between the indefinite article and other articles, the null article included. We conclude that the indefinite article has a close connection, especially in Spanish, with the null article and a functional continuity with the definite article. It is also shown that the number category fills a crucial role in the article system in both these languages.