Historical evolution of lexical concreteness re-revisited

Exoteric languages were argued to have evolved for increased learnability due to pressures imposed by inter-group communication. One aspect relevant to learnability is lexical concreteness. Previous research has shown that English, as a globally spoken language, indeed exhibits a lexical concretization bias. We aim to replicate this result, employing, first, a different way of reconstructing lexical concreteness based on historical corpus data by integrating information about sense-level concreteness, and second, a different operationalization of concretization. Although we still find evidence for a weak concretization bias in English, we cannot confirm previous results about the interaction between concretization and frequency. Potential methodological and theoretical reasons for this discrepancy are discussed.