Scientists are nowadays faced with a few important discontinuities with the past:(a) an exponentially growing rate of technological innovation, (b) the ever-increasing availability of multimodal data, (c) an increasing disciplinary specializa-tion, involving the danger of being blind to interdisciplinarity, and (d) a pressingdemand for problem-oriented interdisciplinarity. 19th century medical practi-tioners based a diagnosis upon visiting their patients. For a 21st century medicaldoctor, patient encounters are complemented by a number of sophisticated diag-nostic techniques, ranging from radiography, PET and MEG to ECG, EEG and ultra-sound. This is what contemporary medicine is about: creating new objects ofscientific inquiry by multiplying and integrating different information sources.21st century language scientists are no exception. They can benefit from anequally large array of technological tools tapping linguistic information at un-precedented levels of range and detail. They know that words, phrases and ut-terances are not just mental representations or convenient descriptive devicesgrounded in introspection and informants’intuition. They are multidimen-sional objects, emerging from interrelated patterns of experience, social inter-action and psychological and neurobiological mechanisms. Investigation ofthese objects calls for integration of manifold information sources at a concep-tual and functional level.