Textual categories, unlike morphological and syntactical or lexical ones, perform at higher levels of expression and are related to the internal organization and pragmatic properties of text. In regards to grammatical characteristics of textual categories, Danuta Ostaszewska writes that this phenomenon hasn't been linguistically analyzed in detail, yet, primarily because there are not enough scientific texts belonging to different functional styles. Researchers of text structure and cohesion include the following in textual categories: informativeness, modality, delimitation, segmentation, coherence, completeness (integration, unification), completion, linear continuity (continuum), autosemantics, repetition, collection, thematisation. Here, A. Wilkoń also includes the semantic category person, as well as the category author, narrator, reader (receiver), time and space. Therefore – as the author notes – text can be studied as a process, an action (linguistic action) or as a final product. The former being dynamic and the latter a static study. From communicational point of view, the former is considered to be more correct. Among other things, this was decisive for the more frequent research in whether texts perform from dynamic aspect, during their creation, or if they are linguistic products, in which case, those closest to communicational acting should undergo analysis. Folk tales belong to this type of texts.

Most characteristic trait of South Slavic folk tales collected by Marko K. Cepenkov is the marking of cohesion of narrative text through different linguistic means belonging to author's narration. This is related to the dominant role of the person who wrote the text down and its properties for creative transformation and secondary text editing expressed by the informer, and more often, fulfilled (expressed) from memory

These include those expressions and linguistic means that primarily fulfill metatextual functions in text merging and concern only the text that follows or proceeds them connecting its elements in cohesive and coherent whole. The following can be found among them: