ABSTRACT
A language is a fixed code of correlations between forms and meanings, and it is the shared access of interlocutors to that code that makes communication possible. The locus of language and the place of the individual within linguistic theory is a basic but unresolved issue'. In Saussure's terms, a language is a set of signs uniting concepts and acoustic images. The psychologistic concerns of Saussurean structuralism, which had been banished from American linguistics in the intervening period, were now to be readmitted. Chomsky's linguistics is one specific version of the psycho-biological interpretation of generativism. Deficiencies of the stimulus fall into two main categories: degeneracy and poverty. A linguist is talking about E-languages to the extent that he views a language as a collection of actions, or linguistic forms paired with meanings, or as a system of linguistic forms. As Bloomfield recognizes, there is no 'indifferent or abstract' form which consists of the morpheme cat without any accompanying secondary phonemes.
