Les types de déterminants du nom en français : classer les indéfinis

We examine how indefinites must be described, concerning French. It concerns items without any pre-established reference, this property being created by contexts of use. Factual uses authorise the emergence of reference. Nominal items which remain indefinite, because of their context, also belong to indefinites, but by adapting their form to the non-referential context. We review recent works describing these interactions between indefinite items and their contexts of use in theoretical linguistics, and briefly introduce Haspelmath’s cartographic presentation for German and French. We put forward a slight revision of Haspelmath’s presentation for French, more in concordance with present uses.