Pushing the boundaries of appliability: Conceptual frameworks in cognitive science and functional linguistics

Uncovering the nature and workings of the mind is one of the most important outstanding research areas in modern science, and the emergence of cognitive science during the mid-20th century advanced attempts to explain this phenomenon. Arising out of the demise of behaviourist psychology in the 1950s, this new discipline was explicitly multi-disciplinary in its outlook; the far-reaching importance of the subject matter meant that there were a number of different interested parties, and the complexity of the mind could only be successfully tackled by drawing upon ideas and expertise from a number of different disciplines. Linguistics has always been a core part of this enterprise (Miller, 2003).