I am sympathetic to Sampson's claim that the various theoretical approaches he discusses are inadequate for explaining how language is used in everyday life. This is why one can find linguists in a variety of disciplines - in university linguistics, English, psychology, computer science, communication disorders, and anthropology departments as well as in industry, working for editing firms, advertising firms, small start-ups, and large companies like Google - with a variety of research interests and methodological expertise. Scientific research in linguistics can run the gamut from descriptive analyses to assessing statistical probabilities of studied phenomena, to treatments for language disorders. Journal of Linguistics Linguists] could do worse than to take seriously Sampson's call for an academic environment which tolerates dissent from monologizing theoretical discourses and holds its members accountable to such scholarly values as self-consistency. Applied Linguistics.