To integrate many of the theoretical linguistic studies examining pronoun reference, this paper focuses on tracing the shift from purely transformational syntactic studies of intrasentential phenomena to the wider orientations of discourse and pragmatic studies. The first section describes the classic studies of pronominalization within the generative-transformational paradigm, explaining how Noam Chomsky's original model has been modified by other linguists. The second section is further divided into two parts: (1) discourse phenomena and (2) semantic/pragmatic phenomena. The first subsection reflects how the movement of linguistics toward more theoretical studies involving text structure has been manifested in studies on the discourse aspects of pronominalization. The second subsection covers work on pronominalization within the framework of semantics and pragmatics. The final section summarizes the literature review and comments on current theories of pronouns. (JL)