This study attempts to describe the usage of English articles not, as in many past studies, using a mixture of lexical, contextual, rhetorical and structural considerations, but rather from a purely structural viewpoint alone. For the purposes of the study zero (0) and unstressed "some" are considered as articles as well as "the,""a," and "an." Although the author's ultimate goal is to establish formulae by which all noun phrases can be grammatically produced in connection with articles, the present study aims at the intermediate goal of establishing a sound structural basis for arriving at such formulae by testing what statements might be made about the obligatory or permissive use of the art on the basis of an examination of the noun structures included in a corpus of current high school textbooks from various fields. Individual parts of the study discuss past work in this area, present the aim and data of the present study, and discuss the procedures used in this work for classifying nouns and noun phrases. The final section presents the author's formulae for using articles. Although this study is not pedagogically oriented, the author hopes that the work reported here may eventually lead to the compilation of a practical guide of formulae to assess the non-native speaker of English in correctly using English articles. (FWB)