The work of de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) already indicates the start of the exploration of discourse beyond strictly surface features. Their “standards” of textuality (cohesion, coherence, intentionality, acceptability, situationality and intertextuality) mark the broadening of interest in phenomena that affect textuality. As for the description of cohesion, Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) analysis of cohesive ties was one of the first attempts to describe text-level characteristics. The popularity of this taxonomy is probably due to its relatively convenient applicability to any text type. At the same time, it provoked a number of negative responses (see, for example, Carrell, 1982). A slightly different approach is taken by Lautamatti’s (1987) Topical Structure Analysis (TSA) model, which describes coherence in a text by inspecting the semantic relationships between sentence topics and the overall discourse topic by analyzing the repetitions, shifts, and reoccurrences of topic. This model is of direct relevance to us here because, in the transformation of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) cohesion analysis method, the idea of representing related entities under each other is used, as it is done in Lautamatti’s (1978) analysis. The notion of representing sentence topics is replaced by a similar representation of reference entities, in a sentence-by-sentence analysis, which will be described in detail in Chapter 6. According to Lautamatti (1987), coherence can be mapped using a system of three distinct progressions:

These progressions are in many ways similar to how referential cohesion appears in texts. The analytical process used in this book to describe reference will likewise identify linguistic items that are semantically related and succeed each other with or without interruption. Therefore, the table used here will be very similar to what is used in TSA, but instead of discourse topics, the focus will be on the relationship between referring and presupposed items.