A monograph on diminutives in Dutch does not exist and this dissertation is intented to fill this gab. I depart from the idea that diminutives exhibit both formal and semantic variation. Formal variation appears both on the phonological level, e.g. suffixallomorphy and stemallomorphy, as on the morphological level, since diminutives are derived from different wordclasses, which differ in productivity and potentiality. Semantic variation concerns the polysemy of diminutives and I try to describe and to account for this polysemy. In the framework of a cognitive linguistic approach to categorization, the semantic structure of the Dutch diminutive is described as a experientially grounded prototypical category characterized by a radial set structure and multiple overlapping.
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