The “verb second constraint” could explain how people acquire language

I definitely agree that universal grammar has been dying a long slow death, but despite press coverage, I suspect universalists are the minority nowadays. Either way I hardly think linguistics has ignored AI/machine learning. In general there's an anticipation of eventual synergy between the domains, but ML has yet to magically solve the "poverty of stimulus" issues with pattern recognition that originally prompted hypotheses like UG...

Chomsky's main influence came not so much from any particular theory as from the fact that he offered a coherent research program to a generation of linguistics grad students.

The resulting hangover is long and painful.

Universal grammar is a theory about how the human mind processes language. AI and ML don't bear on it at all.

That describes so much of the history of Chomsky's theories...

The researchers are identfiying that languages that lost V2 may have underwent specific other syntactic changes in the same period. Since these changes co-occurred in multiple languages at different times, they suggest it's likely there is an underlying structure linking them (...which they conveniently have an explanation for within their particular brand of universalism).

Of course just because language has deeper structures doesn't mean the structures are actually universal. I happen to like a lot of the syntactic mechanisms suggested by minimalists (the work on things like adjective order and clause relations is fascinating) but I don't necessarily believe it's compelling that any of it is an inherent feature in the brain...

EDIT: Here are some presentations by the authors, though I must admit I don't have the time to look though at the moment. http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/traces-o...