  This paper examines demonstrative pronouns used as deictics to refer to the
interpretation of one or more clauses. Although this usage is frowned upon in
style manuals (for example Strunk and White (1959) state that ``This. The
pronoun 'this', referring to the complete sense of a preceding sentence or
clause, cannot always carry the load and so may produce an imprecise
statement.''), it is nevertheless very common in written text. Handling this
usage poses a problem for Natural Language Understanding systems. The solution
I propose is based on distinguishing between what can be pointed to and what
can be referred to by virtue of pointing. I argue that a restricted set of
discourse segments yield what such demonstrative pronouns can point to and a
restricted set of what Nunberg (1979) has called referring functions yield what
they can refer to by virtue of that pointing.
