Centering Theory, transitions and referent marking in the corpus of the written Serbian language

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to map various types of anaphor to the centering transitions in the corpus of Serbian newspaper articles. Centering Theory (WALKER, JOSHI ET AL. 1998) is a theory of local coherence in which four types of transitions are used as parameters of coherence. As is hypothesized in the previous literature based on various languages, the CONTINUE transition is mostly characterized by a minimal form (a zero form of the topic), while the SMOOTH and ROUGH shifts are found with a full noun phrase topic. The analysis shows that the “Ordering Rule” of Centering Theory is not fully followed in the written corpus of the Serbian language since SMOOTH SHIFT has been identified as a prevalent type of transition in the corpus. The following two reasons were identified for that: (1) the genre of the newspaper articles, and (2) the way clauses are combined within a complex sentence in the Serbian written corpus.

Keywords

• Centering Theory
• transition types
• Cb
• Cp
• textual coherence
• segmentation of texts
• clause