UG is Chomsky’s cover term for the “the theory of the genetic endowment for language” that solves the poverty-of-the-stimulus problem — whatever that endowment turns out to be. He and others have made many proposals about what exactly that looks like. It is supposed to be an empirical discovery, not part of the definition of UG, that many of the properties of UG are specific to language in humans, and that many of the properties of UG are unique to humans.

As I understand their paper, Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch use the name FLN to denote the intersection of these two subcomponents of UG: the ones that in humans are specific to language, and the ones that are unique to humans. Then they speculate that the only thing that lies in this interestion is the recursivity of Merge.

In this approach, however, it could very well turn out that some, even many properties of UG lie outside of FLN. For example, it might logically turn out that the universal laws that restrict how pronouns pick their antecedents (“Binding Theory”) is just what you get whenever an organism has some capacity that is not itself domain-specific to language or species-specific to humans, and that capacity cooccurs in the organism with FLN. Binding Theory belongs to UG, as traditionally understood, but part of it would lie outside FLN, in Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch’s sense.

Traditional UG is not supposed to include domain-general factors! It is supposed to be specific to SYNTAX in fact.

Tomasello’s notion of how language works, insofar as he reveals it in his writing and in his talks, is absurdly superficial, in my opinion. If you can name even one serious empirical problem in linguistics that receives a specific solution in Tomasello’s world view, I will be surprised. And I don’t mean broad-brush questions like “how do babies acquire language”, I mean the *specific* problems in actual instances of language acquisition or actual thorny questions of linguistic structure that have led linguists who care about language structure to view things as they do. Like any random page in Guasti’s textbook of language acquisition, for example, or any random page in a recent phonology, morphology, syntax or semantics textbook.

@T. (second comment)

Actually, in case you are wondering, I don’t think the Hauser, Chomsky, Fitch article in Science was a positive contribution, either intellectually or strategically. It was rank speculation, building on other pieces of rank speculation. Shouldn’t have been published.

But it did have something to say, and you have misunderstood it. The paper was not discussing “language” at all, but a theoretical construct created in the paper called “FLN”, “Faculty of Language: Narrow Sense”, distinguished from “FLB”, “Faculty of Language: Broad Sense”. What you and certainly Tomasello would call “language” is FLB. Their idea about recursion concerned FLN. Two different topics entirely. It’s hard to see how any fair-minded reader could miss that. After all, the distinction is repeated and emphasized on literally every page of the paper.

Now I’m not going to use the comments section of someone else’s blog to teach you the paper, especially since I do think it’s weak. But if you insist on talking about it, you have an obligation to stop repeating misrepresentations of it that you have probably heard elsewhere, and read the damn thing. That way at least when you criticize it (or sneer at it), at least you’re engaging with what they actually wrote, not some mixed-up parody.

And by the way, lest there be any doubt what I think about the main topic here, if Hauser did what he is reported to be accused of (I am choosing my words carefully, with strong emphasis on “if”), yes he’s done something terrible. But that does not give ghouls and rubberneckers a license to indulge their own instincts for bad behavior.

I’m going to stop, so if you want the last word, have it.

Whether T is a visionary is beside the point, but anyone who doesn’t think he is hasn’t read his work. He’s a leader in three different fields: primate cognition, early social cognition, language acquisition, and he ties these three together to offer a comprehensive account of the phylogeny and ontogeny of language much more compellingly than any defender of the Universal Grammar Hypothesis (UGH) ever dreamed of.

The sneering tone of your message (“spash in the generativist pond”) is par for the course these days, and part of the problem.

I also think you are dead wrong about the facts, but this is not the place to go into the details, I think.

Tomasello is known mainly an aggressive naysayer (“Universal Grammar is Dead!”, famously), and I don’t see how he can be viewed as any kind of visionary, since he proposes no viable alternative to the ideas he says “no” to.

If you really think Tomasello is mainly known for his anti-UG position you would do well to look a bit further. Even a quick glance at his publication record will show that (1) he does in fact present visionary and viable alternatives for UG, but more importantly, (2) he’s worked on a broad range of topics, only a few of which led him to make a splash in the generativist pond.