The study centers on the question of how recipients of domain-bound expressions decide between anaphoric (text-based) and deictic (extralinguistic) readings. After a thorough discussion of the history of the relevant concepts extending back to antiquity, it proposes a classification model for the description of anaphora and deixis as markers of domain-bound reference that can be distinguished not absolutely but only in degree. Attention is also given both to conflicts between anaphoric and deictic readings (e.g. in text-image relations) and to indirect reference.