Derek Bickerton in _Language and Human Behavior_ argues that all cognition is nothing other than grammar. He suggests that even the structure of picture thinking may have similar though less rigorous organizations to grammar.
His point impresses me in that it certainly would be impossible to have any cognition without grammar and there is no reason to think that there was some other process to grammar that preceded grammar. That is, why unnecessarilly proliferate your explanations. If grammar is sufficeint, then looking for a grammar like origin of grammar is superfluous. The search for UG would be as deep as anyone would need or could go.
Phil Bralich
>I suspect that if we ever do figure out what the general cognitive
>capacities are they will have such an important specialization for
>language that it will be hard to tell whether they don't constitute the
>innate capacity for language.
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