This paper presents a lexical model dedicated to the semanticrepresentation and interpretation of individual words inunrestricted text, where sense discrimination is difficult toassess. We discuss the need of a lexicon including local inferencemechanisms and cooperating with as many other knowledge sources(about syntax, semantics and pragmatics) as possible. We suggest a’minimal‘ representation (that is, the smallest representationpossible) acting as a bridge between a conceptual representation andthe microscopic sense variations of lexical semantics. We describean interpretation method providing one or many alternativecandidate(s) to the word, as representatives of its meaning in thesentence (and text).