The diminutive form eentje A syntactic analysis

In this paper a syntactic analysis of the Dutch diminutive form eentje ‘one.dim’ is put forth. Within a syntactic approach to morphology, it is claimed that the form eentje results from movement operations to license an empty noun. On the basis of data from the Corpus Spoken Dutch (Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch data) on the combination of eentje and één ‘one’ with or without the quantitative pronoun er, it is argued that eentje does not result from nominalization, as could be suggested by the diminutive form in -tje. It is proposed that differences between Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch with respect to the omission of the quantitative pronoun er with één and eentje and higher numerals in the informal data point to a different analysis of een(tje) in these two varieties.