La Composició patrimonial en català perd representativitat : estudi d'un corpus de neologismes de premsa i de ràdio

The present article is intended to show the usefulness of analysing neologisms with a
view to providing a description of a language. The study focusses on nouns in Catalan
newly created from native elements and taken from a diachronic corpus of media texts, both
oral and written, ranging over a period of fifteen years. The neologisms analysed are from
BOBNEO, the database of neologisms of the Observatori de Neologia at Pompeu Fabra
University. One of the principal contributions made by the work is confirmation of the
sharp recession in the productivity of this type of formation (from 8% to 2%). It was also
found that certain structures always considered by grammars to be prototypical of this kind
of process are not at all or hardly at all productive. On the contrary, analysis of neologisms
shows that the majority of those made up of native elements are binomial compounds.