The purpose of this paper is to discuss the utility of lexical neology analysis in linguistic description. This work is part of a large project aiming at contrasting the description of neologisms and neologistic resources used in different modalities of the Catalan language. In this context, we focus our research on neologisms used in the media that are formed by Catalan compounding, which is one of the mechanisms allowing Catalan speakers to form new words using their own linguistic resources. We have analyzed Catalan neologisms formed by compounding in a diachronic corpus of newspaper articles covering a period of fifteen years. The study shows how the productivity of popular compounding has diminished from 8% to 2%. It shows also that the structure of most compounds is NN while the representativity of other structures, significant and productive in the past, appears to be null in the neologism corpus under study.