The words fressen and essen are in fact related historically(fr-derives from the early Germanic word fra),but fressen is no longer a complex word. So words can lose their status of complex word. The existence ofrelated words with a systematic form-meaning difference is crucial in assigning morphological structure to a word.The following Dutch words for different kinds of fish all end in -ing: (2) bokking "bloater",haring "herring",paling "eel", wijting "whiting" Yet,we do not consider this-ing a morphological constituent with the meaning "fish" because there are no corresponding Dutch words bok,haar,paal,and wijt with a meaning related to the corresponding words ending in -ing (these words do exist,but with a completely unrelated meaning). The two sets of words given in (1) form paradigms.The term 'paradigm' is used here in a general sense to denote a set oflinguistic elements with a common property.All words in (1a) are verbs,and thus form a paradigm.The same applies to the words in(1b) which are all nouns ending in -er.In our definition of morphology as given above we see two different perspectives.