zero article

zero article (plural zero articles)

1. (grammar) The non-appearance of an article before a noun.
   • 2011, Leszek Berezowski, “Introduction”, in The Myth of the Zero Article, Bloomsbury Publishing, →ISBN:

     The zero article is the oddball of the English article system. For one thing, it's a newcomer. […] The book argues that the zero article is an artifact of the structural paradigm of language research that has outlived the heyday of the theory that has spawned it and remains in use merely as a fig leaf concealing the fact that a number of grammatical issues have failed so far to attract the interest of scholars working in later and more adequate frameworks.