Discourse structure is reflected by a number of global prosodic parameters, like for example pause duration and pitch range. Discourse structure is also known to affect the accessibility/salience of antecedents of anaphoric expressions. Assuming these generalizations are correct, one can ask whether listeners use the information encoded in pauses and pitch range to resolve anaphoric references in ambiguous contexts. To examine this, we conducted a series of perception experiments with ambiguous discourses, where the pitch range of the sentences and the pause duration between sentences was manipulated. The results of our experiments corroborate our main research hypothesis that global prosodic parameters influence the resolution of anaphoric pronouns. The direction of the observed effect is clearly in accordance with the predictions of the existing theories of discourse anaphora and the current state of research on discourse prosody.

There is every indication that an object-oriented view of an information system is a solid foundation for understanding its legacy organization, for relating it to the environment in which it is embedded and for guiding its reengineering. In this paper we present a framework based upon the formal object-oriented specification language TROLL, which provides an object-oriented view of legacy information systems. The aim is to combine existing methods and keep results in a common and suitable description base which provides the appropriate form for deriving object specifications from the legacy IS. We usethe language TROLL not only as description language, but also as a framework to support the maintenance engineers in their reverse engineering tasks by giving hints about what to do next to complete the object specifications. The result of the approach is a formal object-oriented specification of the legacy IS that is suitable both for developing a new IS or for reengineering the legacy system.