Keywords

• The author studies a particular group of complex mono-lexical German words
• actually words with composed morpho-syntactic shape
• and non compositional meaning. The interesting fact of these words is that
• on one hand
• their functional characteristics haven't been widely studied and
• on the other hand
• they appear difficult to be learned
• both in an acquirement perspective of the first language
• and in the learning of German as a second and/or foreign language. The argument is made up of three parts: in the first one there is an examination of the critical literature available for this kind of words
• in the second one their morpho-syntactic and semantic peculiarities will be analysed
• and finally the third part will propose a redefinition of these words as idiomatic or phrasal words
• similar to idiomatic or phrasal expressions