This article is devoted to the functioning of the article in common prepositional-nominal phrases in French and Spanish within the framework of syntagmatic and paradigmatic approaches. The purpose of the study is to identify similarities and differences in the choice of article forms in the prepositional-nominal construction in two related Romance languages. Tasks: characterization of the functional side of the article as a grammatical class; identification of factors of choice of the article before the main and dependent nouns; differentiation of the absence of the article and the null article; identification of types of semantic relations between the components of a phrase; analysis of French and Spanish materials. Research methods: functional analysis of linguistic units, continuous sampling method, transformation method, contextual analysis, descriptive and comparative methods, elements of quantitative analysis for statistical data processing. The theoretical significance is the integration of classical theories of the article and modern approaches, clarifying the typology of the null article in relation to prepositional and nominal constructions. The scientific novelty consists in a comprehensive comparative analysis of ten types of semantic relations between the components N1 of N2 based on the material of two Romance languages, as well as the quantitative distribution of the four types of the zero article. Practical significance is the possibility of using the results in courses on theoretical grammar of French and Spanish, comparative typology, translation practice, and the development of textbooks on Romance philology. The main conclusions: The Spanish language demonstrates a systematically higher frequency of the use of the null article; The definite article is more common in French; the partitive article of French has no direct counterpart in Spanish.