This chapter reviews crucial concepts for this book, namely "family resemblance" and "prototype". This review chapter is organised with a view to provide a new generic structure analytical model that integrates approaches across disciplines, including cognitive sciences, psychology, and cognitive linguistics. The chapter outlines the insights and wealth of research across these disciplines that have the potential to offer a consistent cognitive-based understanding of the research of academic genre studies, which form a crucial foundation for this book to propose a new model.