In a combined functional, cognitive and textual perspective and with focus on the contrastive aspect, the present study defines textual information density by the following three parameters: 1) the relation between explicit and implicit information; 2) the concrete elaboration of explicit information density; 3) the relation between "proper" information and the quantity of linguistic material which codes textual and interpersonal information. This study also presents an analytical model in order to compare the information density of different texts. As empiric material the interlinguistic Mr. Bean corpus is applied