International audience Localism is the hypothesis that spatial relations play a fundamental role in the semanticsof languages. Localism has a long history. The first instance of a localistaccount can be found in Aristotle’s Physics. Later, localist ideas surface time andagain for the purpose of analyzing prepositions, cases and transitivity. The firstpart 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 neolocalisminvolves two main lines of investigation: thematic roles and lexical semantics, especiallythe semantic analysis of prepositional meanings. In this paper, our nexttask will be to contextualize the development of these two strands by placing themin their theoretical environment. Both begin to flourish at a significant juncturemarked by the rise of cognitive science and by the semantic turn observable in linguisticsin the 1960s. This global context is the subject of our second part and setsthe stage for a discussion of neolocalist accounts in the third part. Lastly, since thispaper makes no pretense at being exhaustive, we draw attention to questions thathad to be left out: the existence of more “abstract” forms of localism, the connectionof localism with “grounded cognition” and, finally, diachronic studies.