The goal of this paper is to compare the different anaphoric strategies that Catalan and Catalan Sign Language (LSC) use by means of a parallel corpus. In particular, our comparison is focused in an examination of the uses of overt subject pronouns in Catalan and how these uses are rendered in a language that exploits the visual-manual modality, such as LSC. As far as we know, this is one of the first studies to compare reference-tracking devices in a spoken and a signed language by means of a parallel corpus and incorporating both a descriptive and a theoretical perspective. All instances of overt pronouns in Catalan were analyzed and most of the data can be accounted with three factors: topic change, focus and contrast. As for LSC, the use of pronouns is rare and only few instances were found. Instead, other anaphoric strategies are used: while topic change and focus are primarily encoded with bare nouns, the expression of contrast relies on modality-specific features.