This study is the first systematic description and analysis of the text-linguistic phenomenon of indirect anaphora (associative or contiguous anaphora) to do justice to its full variational richness as one of the forms of textual reference establishing coherence. Against the background of modern text theory indirect anaphora are shown to be a type of domain-bound textual reference (i.e. a form of reference dependent on representation of knowledge activated in the fore-text) and to call for explanation as the explicit expression of implicit coherence relations in texts. On the basis of copious examples from natural-language texts it is argued that direct and indirect anaphora can be accounted for in one unified explanatory model.