Approaching UG from Below

The problem that has virtually defined the serious study of language since its ancient origins, if only implicitly, is to identify the specific nature of this distinctive human possession. Within the “biolinguistic perspective” that began to take shape fifty years ago, the concern is transmuted into the effort to determine the genetic endowment of the faculty of language FL, understood to be a “cognitive organ,” in this case virtually shared among humans and in crucial respects unique to them, hence a kind of species property. So construed, language is I-language, a state of FL, and universal grammar (UG) is reinterpreted as the theory of the initial state of FL. The term “biolinguistics” itself was coined in…