The volume contains a selection of the papers given at an international conference organized in 1995 on the application of new theories and description methods to the lexicological analysis and lexicographic description of the Romance languages, with special reference to French and Italian. Central subjects are: the fine-honing and reformulation of the structuralist approach to the analysis of semantic features in the light of more recent developments and approaches (cognitive semantics, frames and scenes, stereotype semantics); the semantics of morphologically complex words; the syntactic aspects of the lexicon (modern versions of valency theory, lexical-functional grammar); and the role of the computer in the ongoing development of methods of analysis and description of semantic and syntactic structures of the lexicon in lexicography and elsewhere.