The genesis and dynamics of spatial adpositions: Claude Vandeloise’s last written works (Hors-série Corela, HS-23)

Abstract

On August 22th 2007, Claude Vandeloise passed away succumbing to a searing cancer. A few months before his death, he had submitted a paper entitled expression of proximity in French and in English to Corela. The evaluation of the paper was still in progress when he died and, as a consequence, it was interrupted. The relations between Vandeloise and Corela were actually not new at that time, since he had showed an enthusiastic support to this online editorial project from the very beginning; his support has even proven to be very important for this young, innovative journal over the years. With distance and hindsight, it seems that the paper submitted to Corela in 2007 is in fact the last article Claude Vandeloise ever writes. The links with other late productions (about the genesis of spatial terms/adpositions and the systems of basic locative prepositions in French vs. English) as well as the insertion of a factual element referring to a search on the web in May 2007 strengthen this assumption. It then occurred to us that these different contents should be brought to the attention of the linguistic research community. In order to make them as accessible as possible and given the close ties of Vandeloise with Corela, we thought that a publication in this open access journal was all the more appropriate.