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This volume unites contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field of quantitative linguistics. The contributions were presented at the Quan-titative Linguistics Conference (Qualico 2009, Graz), standing in a tradition of previous meetings organized by the International Quantitative Linguistics Asso-ciation IQLA (www.iqla.org). As a discipline, quantitative linguistics typically follows a specific scientific paradigm: in this theoretical framework, (qualitative) linguistic hypotheses are ‘translated ’ into quantitative terms and tested by means of statistical proce-dures. The results are first quantitatively interpreted, which leads to either the rejection or the retainment of the hypothesis; only then are they, after some kind of ‘re-translation ’ into linguistic terms, qualitatively interpreted and em-bedded into theoretical concepts. The application of mathematical and statisti-cal methods thus is no self-contained aim or objective in a quantitative linguis-tics framework, but one necessary step in the logic of science. In detail, against the background of this general approach, the complex rela-tions between ‘text ’ and ‘language ’ are specifically focused in the contributions to this volume. Given such a broad horizon of quantitative linguistics, it is not astonishing that there are many implicit or explicit points of contact with, or even technical references to neighboring disciplines- not only to mathematics, statistics, or information sciences, but also to computer linguistics, corpus lin-guistics, literary scholarship including individual and inter-individual stylistics, and others. After all, quantitative linguistics turns out to be genuinely interdis-ciplinary. SP