Maybe some of you will know, why isn't there any article 'a' before the nouns 'year' in the phrase "year followed year"?
This phenomenon is also present in phrases like "year after year", "month after month", "day in, day out" etc. Thanks in advance!
The general guidance (not “a rule”) for students is that all singular, countable nouns must be qualified by a determiner or quantifier – the cat, a month, any apple, one car, my ball, that house, etc.
That guidance is not valid for all functions of a noun – in many cases the noun becomes uncountable and is used to describe a particular example of that noun.
In this case, the guidance is:
If the noun is part of a prepositional phrase, we have
When I was in college / He was at home / They sent him to prison / we did it in bed / I saw it on television / By day, he was a policeman; by night he was a burglar / He went to town by bus.
And we have a double expression – {X preposition X} – which creates an adverbial or adjectival phrase.
Arm in arm, they walked along the road. / They were side by side / Year after year, she grew more beautiful.
If a noun is the name of a general institution, we have
He left college/prison/hospital/home. College/prison/hospital/home is where he ended his days.
There are also some expression of the form {X coordination conjunction Y} in which X and Y form a natural pair – They are husband and wife. / Pen and paper to hand, I started the letter.
If a noun is used to designate one from a class of previously mentioned objects, we have
I had to look after a dog, a cat and a parrot. I left them alone for a moment and, when I came back, dog, cat and parrot were chasing each other around the room.
In your case, we have "Year following year, he waited for the ship to return."
Year following year = "Each year that followed the previous year" and the whole clause is adverbial.
As it is adverbial, the noun(s) are uncountable.
In English, there is the Concept of "Zero Article", along with the well-known articles "the", "a" and "an", which are used to refer to nouns.
While "the" goes with Definite nouns, "a" and "an" go with general, non-specific nouns.
The "Zero Article" or "Zero Determiner" is used when (in general) it is even more non-specific.
Consider these three cases:
(1) It was the hottest year of the Eighteenth Century when the Queen was ill [[ very specific, because there is only one "hottest" year ]]
(2) It was a very hot year when the Queen was ill [[ non-specific, because there are many "very hot" years ]]
(3) While year followed year, the Queen was continuously ill, showing no signs of recovery [[ very non-specific, because there are many years over which the Queen was ill ]]
There are many online references to "Zero Article" or "Zero Determiner" ; Here are two :
https://www.thoughtco.com/zero-article-grammar-1692619
https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/determiners-zero-article.htm
Year is a plural (or countable) noun, in the sense that it is a noun that can take a plural form (as opposed to a mass noun e.g. sugar), but in this case the reference is indefinite since you are not referring to a defined period of time (e.g. a year i.e. one year), so the zero article is used (no article).
