A Funktionsverbgefüge (FVG), or "support-verb construction," is a fixed combination of a semantically bleached verb and an abstract noun — often derived from a verb — in which the verb no longer carries its original lexical meaning but merely supplies tense, mood, and person, while the noun carries the real meaning of the whole phrase. In other words, the unit of meaning is no longer the verb alone but the verb-plus-noun pair together, a pair that can often be replaced by a single simple verb that already exists in the language, as in treffen eine Entscheidung ("to make a decision") alongside the simpler entscheiden ("to decide").
This construction is pervasive in formal, administrative, journalistic, legal, and academic German because it grants the writer more expressive flexibility than a simple verb allows: adjectives can be attached to the noun (eine wichtige Entscheidung treffen), the phrase converts easily into a nominal construction or into the passive voice (eine Entscheidung wurde getroffen), and it lends a more formal, objective tone suited to administrative and journalistic registers. Mastering it is a clear marker of a C1 level, since native speakers instinctively distinguish plain colloquial phrasing from polished formal prose.
Mechanically, there is no logical way to predict which support verb pairs with which noun; the combinations behave like fixed collocations that must simply be memorized as ready-made units: treffen with Entscheidung and Maßnahmen, bringen with zum Ausdruck and zur Sprache, nehmen with Rücksicht and Bezug, stellen with Antrag and Frage, kommen with in Frage, stehen with zur Verfügung. Many of these combinations carry a fixed preposition, and the noun sometimes appears with no article at all, as in in Frage kommen or zur Verfügung stehen — a pattern that departs from the more familiar rule that a noun is usually accompanied by a definite or indefinite article.
A very common mistake among advanced learners is constructing a new FVG by logical analogy, saying machen eine Entscheidung instead of treffen eine Entscheidung, or dropping the fixed preposition, as in nehmen Rücksicht without auf, or inserting an article where none belongs, as in in die Frage kommen instead of in Frage kommen. The only remedy is to memorize each FVG as a complete unit — verb, preposition, and case together — exactly as one memorizes an idiom, rather than trying to reassemble it from its separate parts.