The formal links are as follows
Referring Expressions are words whose meaning can only be discovered by referring to other words or to elements of the context which are clear to both sender and receiver. The most obvious example is the third person pronouns ( he/him/his/himself, she/her/hers/herself, it/its/itself, they/them/their/theirs/ themselves ). We can also use words like here and there, this and that to refer to a preceding noun. If we are listening to a stoiy and somebody says So, I ate it. , we may well know the meaning of it from somewhere earlier in the stoiy. We choose the most likely meaning for it from the text.