This study explores discourse deixis, a topic which has thus far received little attention in empirical research. Discourse deixis means the reference to parts or aspects of the ongoing discourse and/or text. Common examples are “see above” or “as I mentioned before”. The approach of this study is corpus-based, that is, it identifies and classifies all discourse-deictic references in the corpora of various kinds of texts. From the evidence thus gained a new theory of discourse deixis is derived.