The present analytical tool, Referential Cohesion Analysis (RCA), had Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) taxonomy and method as a starting point. The taxonomy is a strong theoretical background for any cohesion analysis; however, their method for analysis (see Chapter 5) is limited in a number of ways (see Section 5.3.5). Briefly, concerning any analyzed text, the result of their analysis yields the following data for each sentence: the number of cohesive ties and the types of ties in them. In addition, for each cohesive item, there is a number that indicates its distance from the last presupposed item, along with a number that indicates how many presupposed items lead us to the original one. By the end of the analysis, one can tell the frequency of the various (lexical, grammatical, conjunctive, etc.) kinds of cohesive ties in the text, and can find the longest chains by looking at the numbers for the longest distances. However, enumerating all the referential chains and following through on the actual elements that a chain contains using this method of analysis is virtually impossible. As regards the structure of the text, the distribution of the cohesive chains, and their actual content, Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) method says very little. The analysis is slow, and overlaps between categories result in inconsistencies in the analysis. Overall, the method cannot handle errors encountered in texts effectively. Any ambiguity or vagueness undermines the results of the whole analysis (the cohesive chains break); moreover, it cannot display cohesive ties between multiple or missing presupposed items.