This paper investigates the morphological properties of English IE-hypocoristics (e.g. nightie, shortie, Jenny) in order to clarify the grammatical status of the affix. By examining IE’s selectional properties as well as its interaction with other types of morphological processes, like derivation, inflection and compounding, it will be shown that IE cannot belong to a separate class of evaluative affixes. Instead it can merge with either roots or categorised roots yielding different prosodic properties. An important result of this investigation is the identification of phrasal hypocoristics based on elliptical noun phrases, in which IE is a clitic on a monosyllabic adjective. The phrasal analysis accounts for the productive 'nominalisations' with adjectival bases noted in the literature. The two types of hypocoristics can, however, be given a unified analysis within the framework of Distributed Morphology. A second goal of the paper is to show how the prosodic structure of IE-hypocoristics can be derived from their morphosyntactic structure by employing a phase-based Spell-Out mechanism.