The present paper examines systematicity in second language article use, in narratives written by Finnish- and Swedish-speaking adolescent learners of English, from the combined perspective of two putative discourse universals related to topic continuity: the tendency to mark the distinction between topics and comments and the tendency to mark the distinction between new, continuous, and reintroduced noun phrase referents. The results suggest that numerous other elements are required to define the systematicity of individual's interlanguage article use.