As religious texts are often composed in metaphorical and lyrical language, the role of multi-word expressions (MWE) can be considered even more important than usually for automatic processing. Therefore a method of extracting MWE is needed, that is capable of dealing with this complexity. Because of its ability to model various linguistic phenomena with the help of syntactical and lexical context, the approach of Local Grammars by Maurice Gross seems promising in this regard. For the study described in this paper I evaluate the use of this method on the basis of a Spanish version of the Hindu poem Bhagavad Gita. The search will be refined on nominal MWE, i.e. nominal compounds and frozen expressions with two or three main elements. Furthermore, the analysis is based on a set of semantic classes for abstract nouns, especially on the semantical class "phenomenon". In this article, the theory and application of Local Grammars is described, and the very first results are discussed in detail.