From localism to neolocalism

Localism is the hypothesis that spatial relations play a fundamental role in the
semantics of languages. Localism has a long history. The first instance of a localist
account can be found in Aristotle’s Physics. Later, localist ideas surface time and
again for the purpose of analyzing prepositions, cases and transitivity. The first
part of this paper will be devoted to a short account of past localist ideas.
Remarkably, new forms of localism have reappeared in the past decades. This neolocalism
involves two main lines of investigation: thematic roles and lexical semantics,
especially the semantic analysis of prepositional meanings. In this paper, our next
task will be to contextualize the development of these two strands by placing them
in their theoretical environment. Both begin to flourish at a significant juncture
marked by the rise of cognitive science and by the semantic turn observable in
linguistics in the 1960s. This global context is the subject of our second part and sets
the stage for a discussion of neolocalist accounts in the third part. Lastly, since this
paper makes no pretense at being exhaustive, we draw attention to questions that
had to be left out: the existence of more “abstract” forms of localism, the connection
of localism with “grounded cognition” and, finally, diachronic studies.