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.