By contrast to the approaches known as “paradigmatic” or “syntagmatic” which correlate linguistic phenomena and textual (or discursive) genres, we illustrate, by taking the example of the referential chains, a “configurational” approach which makes it possible in a more operational way to distinguish the genres (here of the news in brief and the incipit of fairy tales). This approach combines the quantitative dimension of the paradigmatic approaches by the enumeration of certain categories grammatical and lexical, as well as the syntagmatic approach due naturally to the linearity of the coreference chains and what this one implies (length and range of the chains, outdistances between the links, etc.).