Based on a corpus of neologisms extracted from Catalan newspapers (published between 1979 and 1983), the author aims to show two fundamental trends in the lexical modernization of Catalan: a) the innovation of socio-political vocabulary reinforces the international character of the lexicon and the models that serve for the formation of new words, while the discourse on the norm gives a clearly purist orientation; b) in the sense of neologisms, there is also a slight tendency towards the elimination of castillianisms, that is, towards a differentiation from Spanish, while the integration of anglicisms and gallicisms is much easier. Despite this, the first trend is predominant, especially in the reduction of internal models of word formation in favor of those that are used, preferably, also in other languages. Finally, reflections are made on the methodological-theoretical value of analyzes for the establishment of a theory of language policy.