On Tuesday 5^th June, Prof Bernard Quémada passed away, aged 91. In France he is considered the starter of Modern Lexicology and Lexicography, his legacy also including the earliest usage of electronic tools, especially regarding computer-based processing of texts for lexicographical purposes.

Prof Quémada, BA in Literature from Sorbonne University, and licensed from The Institute of French Teachers Abroad, read his first PhD dissertation in 1949 (Le vocabulaire de la galanterie dans les romans mondains (1640-1710)), and his second PhD dissertation in 1967 (Les dictionnaires du français moderne (1539-1863)). He pursued his teaching academic career successively at several universities: Sorbonne, Besançon, Fontenay et Saint-Cloud, Besançon, and, finally, Sorbonne and Paris 13 –as a tenured lecturer of French Linguistics. During the late 1950s, Prof Quémada introduced Lexicology as a new scientific domain, thus fostering the earliest text-processing specialized research groups.

In addition, Prof Quémada first published the journal Cahiers de Lexicologie and edited it, along with a number of other journals and series. Between 1977 and 1994 he was the editor of the Trésor de la langue française. In 1977 he founded and led the Institut National de la langue française (INALF), a part of CNRS, in Nancy. In 1989 he was appointed by the then-PM Michel Rocard deputy president of the Conseil supérieur de la langue française. Prof Quémada also undertook several applied enterprises, such as the corpus Frantext (with 180 million de occurrences), and –jointly with Antonio Zampolli, from the late 1980s onwards– a series of research projects and co-operative networks in the field of Computational Applied Linguistics in Europe (ELRA, and LREC). Given his involvement in all the aspects of lexicon, Prof Quémada contributed to establish Realiter, a co-operative active network for the development of Terminology in Romance languages.

The academics at IULA would like to express our condolences following the demise of Prof Bernard Quémada. We have remembered him with admiration and esteem since 1995, when he first came at IULA as a guest speaker in the framework of the PhD Programme in Applied Linguistics: Lexicon, Corpus, and Dictionaries. We always kept a tight link with Prof Quémada: he contributed to the book-formatted tribute to Prof M Teresa Cabré in 2007, and –joint with Prof Antoni M Badia i Margarit– he was the honorary president of the I International Conference of Neology in the Romance Languages (CINEO, for its initials in Catalan), which took place on May 2008 in Barcelona. Later, in 2013, in Paris, Prof Quémada was met by some members of IULA during a tribute to himself, organized by the research network Realiter –which he founded.

Acknowledging his mastery, may Prof Quémada rest in peace.