Semantic features in a generic lexicon

Considering that there are many different syntactic and semantic theories, this article is concerned with entering enough information into a generic lexicon to provide each of these theories with what it needs to work. Providing information for different uses implies organizing that information into a hierarchy of pieces of information. The first part of the article is devoted to this question. The hierarchy of information comes from an observational level and is based on a description of a language, paying attention to what constructions are permitted or not. The second part of the article defines a description meta-language for semantic information, linked to the phenomenological description of the syntax. In the third part, the authors examine nouns, and how the descriptions of meanings can be arranged in order to solve questions of metaphor and polysemy.