Two corpora of around 10,000 words each in English and in French were manually labelled, and the frequency of each mode of determination was calculated for all common noun-based noun phrases (NPs), i.e. excluding proper nouns and pronouns. A comparison was then made between the frequency of each mode of determination in NPs without any sort of adjectival qualification, those associated with a single predicative adjective but without any sort of adnominal (attributive) qualification, and those containing either a single adnominal adjective, or other similar adnominal forms (e.g. participles or multiple modifiers). A distinction was made in French between NPs containing pre-nominal and post-nominal adjectives. A small number of NPs associated with more than one type of adjectival qualification simultaneously (e.g. adnominal+predicative) were excluded to facilitate the comparison between these two types of qualification. It was thus ascertained that the frequency of different modes of determination varies significantly according to the type of adjectival qualification. Although the definite articles are the dominant determiner in both languages in all circumstances, their frequency increases among NPs qualified by predicative adjectives, and decreases in French when an adnominal adjective is present, especially in pre-nominal position. Indefinite articles and null determiners are all but absent from NPs qualified predicatively. Indefinite articles display a strong affinity with adnominal qualification in both languages, however, given that more than half of NPs determined by an indefinite article also contain an adnominal modifier.