Idont know why they call it “simpler syntax “… its realy hard.

thank you

Clearly, we need something other than UG to account for the acquisition of all sorts of non-universal features of language. However, if we are forced to posit other non-UG mechanisms to account for these non-universal features, it seems to me that these very same mechanisms (whatever they are) should be capable, on a language-by-language basis, of accounting for the acquisition of nominally ‘universal’ features as well, as well as non-universal ones.

Exactly — and this is what constructional approaches try to do. This is also why I point out that UG may slip through our fingers if we are serious about accounting for language acquisition in a psychologically realistic way. There may be some use for ‘simple nativist’ principles that provide necessary mental prestructuring, but the question is whether (and why) these would be specific to some ‘language faculty’.

It just seems to make more sense to me to cast the net wider, and therefore I’m more sympathetic to an approach like Tomasello’s (e.g. The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition, 1999), which situates the human evolutionary advantage in uniquely human, but less domain-specific cognitive capacities like being able to recognize communicative intentions in conspecifics (intention attribution).

Tomasello, by the way, has also challenged the status of the ‘poverty of the stimulus’ argument. It has been the Received View for a long time, but he argues that actually, developmental evidence supports the idea that there is no such thing as the poverty of the stimulus. There has been a major discussion on the pages of Cognition some years ago.

Incidentally, I find the shrinking of UG from its original breadth to its current reduced breadth to significantly undermine one of its most attractive characteristics to me, namely its role as an answer to ‘Plato’s Problem’ and the associated ‘poverty of the stimulus’ argument.

Clearly, we need something other than UG to account for the acquisition of all sorts of non-universal features of language. However, if we are forced to posit other non-UG mechanisms to account for these non-universal features, it seems to me that these very same mechanisms (whatever they are) should be capable, on a language-by-language basis, of accounting for the acquisition of nominally ‘universal’ features as well, as well as non-universal ones. This ‘Grammar of the Gaps’ situation seems to put UG in a very awkward position in terms of the quasi-philosophical reasoning that makes it attractive in the first place.