This article questions the categorical status of evaluative derived lexemes built by suffixation. It would indeed seem that, whatever the lexical class of the latter – noun (maison ‘house’ / maisonnette ‘little house’), adjective (jaune ‘’yellow / jaunâtre ‘yellowish’) or verb (taper ‘to hit’ / tapoter ‘to tap’) – the relationship between the base and the derived lexeme is not identical to that observed in the case of prototypical lexical hierarchies such as hyperonymy (maison ‘house’ / villa ‘villa’; cf. e. g. Kleiber 1990). Thus, for example, while a noun like villa denotes a type of house (Mihatsch 2007), it seems difficult to claim that maisonnette ‘small house’ also denotes a type of house. It is therefore not by chance that, in lexical semantics, evaluative lexemes are never integrated into lexical hierarchies: morphological evaluation can indeed be considered as one of the mechanisms allowing the expression of the categorical approximation.