Book Review

Since the first quantitative linguistics conference held at the University of Trier, Germany, in 1991, five more QUALICO’s have taken place in various places both in the New and Old Worlds on a wide spectrum of topics concerning ‘‘the multitude of quantitative properties which are essential for the description and understanding of the development and the functioning of linguistic systems and their components’’ (Köhler & Altmann, 2005, p. 12). These topics cover all the 10 major areas of quantitative linguistics summarized by Köhler, Altmann and Piotrowski (2005) and more, since quantitative linguistics now ‘‘has grown to a degree which makes it difficult to maintain an overview over the many topics and objects of investigation, the models and methods applied and developed, and the various results published in books and in several journals’’ (Grzybek & Köhler, 2007, p. viii). The latest QUALICO was held in Graz, Austria, in 2009. At the conference, 23 papers by scholars of international status were presented, which were subsequently put into a book entitled Text and Language with a subtitle Structures, Functions, Interrelations, Quantitative Perspectives, published by Praesens Verlag in 2010, with Grzybek, Kelih, and Ma cutek as editors. As the title suggests, the 23 contributions of the book mainly focus on the quantitative analyses and measurement of text components, constructs, functions and distributions involving 12 different languages. In addition, topics on some well-known linguistic laws, problems with statistical methods and applications of corpora and software packages for language research Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 2012, Volume 19, Number 2, pp. 162–170 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2012.659002