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Work within the minimalist program attempts to meet the criterion of evolvability: "any mechanisms and primitives ascribed to UG rather than derived from independent factors must plausibly have emerged in what appears to have been a unique and relatively sudden event on the evolutionary timescale" (Chomsky et al., 2017). On minimalist assumptions the evolution of the language faculty must have involved at least three major developments: (i) the evolution of computational atoms, lexical items, understood as bundles of features, (ii) the evolution of a single, simple recursive operation that glues together lexical items and complexes of lexical items, and (iii) externalization linking the syntactic component of the language faculty to the cognitive systems that humans use for sound and gesture. The first development, the evolution of lexical items and the lexicon, is especially poorly understood. A complete account of the evolution of lexical items will state what evolved, how, and why. The focus of this article is the first question: what evolved. What properties do lexical items have, what determines these properties, and what is the internal structure of lexical entries? The article identifies what the key open problems are for a minimalist account of the evolution of words that strives to meet the criterion of evolvability.

The current article deals with functioning of youth sociolect in professionally-related and everyday communication. It relies on the concept of professional discourse. A special attention is given to professional interaction, based on professional interests. The field study is developed to investigate the usage of youth sociolect words, involving macro-sociolinguistic monitoring of frequency occurrence of English slang words in production sphere. The initial stage of the field study included the questionnaire development, defining the boundaries of monitoring, the number of lexical items under monitoring, the place of monitoring and the age of respondents. The second step in the project was monitoring. Finally, the results of monitoring were analyzed. The study was carried out through on-line questionnaire, face-to-face and remote interviewing, administered to respondents both in the production sphere and other spheres of activity. Native and non-native speakers from different countries and regions participated in the on-line questionnaire. The monitoring of frequency usage demonstrates that a limited number of lexical units of English youth slang are used in professional activity; the other part of lexicon presents a diverse picture. The article gives a number of diagrams and graphs to provide statistics confirming priority and universal use of English words of youth slang. © Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.