This study propounds the thesis that in language two strategies can be found to produce reference that differ in profundity and character from one language to another: deixis and anaphor. By means of contrastive analysis of two language systems that are far removed from each other phylogenetically, the study shows that the aforementioned reference strategies determine the grammar of the language to a great extent. This is demonstrated on all relevant linguistic levels ‑ on the textual level, on the sentence level and on the word level.