Abstract：Discrete academic disciplines were identified and institutionalized as university departments between the mid-19th century and the early 20th century. Calls for interdisciplinarity ensured soon thereafter to address what was considered to be the most serious downside of the process–lack of proper communication and interaction between the disciplines. Interdisciplinary collaboration has been actively promoted since the 1970s as an indispensable approach to tackle tasks of gigantic proportions facing contemporary society, and at the same time as the most effective way leading to innovation. This article proposes a typology of four types of interdisciplinary activities–multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary, each with its distinctive features. It elaborates on how linguistics has benefited from interactions with other fields of intellectual pursuit since Plato and Aristotle, and what contributions it has made to the advancement of knowledge in other disciplines, highlighting in particular the continuous cross-fertilization of ideas between language studies and philosophy, logic, mechanics, mathematics, biology, psychology, computer science and anthropology.
