Although recently phraseology has become well known and widely studied in various languages, its scope still remains at the lexical-syntactic level. The very term phraseology seems to imply that this phenomenon is restricted to phrases only. Consequently, morphological compounds or derivatives are usually excluded from the scope of phraseological studies. Phrasemes, however, are not necessarily phrases (syntactically connected wordforms). Korean, in particular, have many compounds or derivatives that have to be analyzed and modeled as phrasemes. Like their phrasal counterparts, some Korean compounds or derivatives are paradigmatically restricted. We term these ‘morphological phrasemes.’ In this study, we first postulate ‘complex expressions’ and ‘paradigmatical restrictedness’ as definitional properties of phrasemes. Additionally, we distinguish compositional phrasemes (such as collocations and cliché) and non-compositional phrasemes (such as idioms). To show the phraseologisation at the wordform level, we apply the same criteria of phraseologisation, restrictedness and (non-) compositionality to Korean nominal compounds. According to these criteria, we classify three types of compounds (free compounds, semi-phraseologized compounds and phraseologized compounds) and propose a lexicographic modeling of Korean nominal compounds.
