The first case concerns attributively used past/passive participles. Attributively used participles occasionally retain some of their verbal properties; cf. Section 31.2. For example, the participle gewaardeerdappreciated in (39a) resembles a regular passive participle in that it can license a passive door-phrase. Example (39b) shows that the participle cannot undergo morphological majorative formation, while the acceptability of (39c) seems to suggest that the periphrastic majorative leads to an acceptable result; if so, the participle should be seen as an adjective.

However, example (39c) may be deceptive. Since Section 26.2, sub III, will show that adverbially used adjectives can also occur in the majorative form, it would seem that the element meer does not form a periphrastic majorative with the participle gewaardeerd, but fulfills an adverbial function similar to that in example (40a). The maximative construction with meestmost sheds light on this question: if we replace the majorative meer in (40a) by the maximative meest, as in (40b), it must be preceded by the element het.

Since attributively used superlatives are never preceded by het, we can test whether meer in (39c) is part of a periphrastic majorative meer gewaardeerd or acts as an independent adverb by replacing it with the superlative form meest. Since (41) shows that het must be present in this case, we should conclude that meer/meest in (39c) and (41) are the majorative/maximative forms of the independent adverb that we also find in (40), and that they do not form a periphrastic majorative/maximative construction with the past/passive participle.

If the door-phrase in (41) is omitted, the element het is preferably absent, which suggests that we are dealing with a periphrastic majorative/maximative form in the examples in (42). If this is indeed the case, the contrast with example (41) may be related to the fact that the participle in example (42) has lost its verbal character and behaves as a true adjective; cf. Section 31.2.

In the remainder of this subsection, however, we will show that the fact that it is possible to drop the element het in (42b) is still not conclusive, and that we are not really dealing with periphrastic majorative/maximative constructions in (42) either. A first, somewhat weak argument is that the majorative/maximative form cannot be expressed by morphological means, which may be somewhat suspect, since at least some of the pseudo-participles given in (35) can undergo the morphological affixation process.

A more compelling argument is that attributively used participles can also be accompanied by degree modifiers of a more adverbial nature, like goedwell in (44a). The crucial observation is that the superlative form of the adverb in (44c) does not need to be preceded by the element het either.

The examples in (45) show that a similar effect can be observed when we are dealing with the superlative form of the modifier of a pseudo-participle or a true set-denoting adjective.

Although it is not immediately clear what causes the degraded status of the noun phrases in (44c) and (45) when het is present, it is clear that we should conclude that adverbially used superlatives need not be accompanied by the element het when they act as modifiers of attributive adjectives, contrary to what is the case when they modify a predicatively used adjective, as in (46). The conclusion must be that the absence of the element het in (42) is not sufficient for claiming that we are dealing with a periphrastic superlative.

Finally, we want to propose that the markedness of the use of het in examples (42b), (44c) and (45) is caused by the fact that it occurs adjacent to the definite article. This claim can be supported by the fact that het deletion also occurs with predicatively and adverbially used superlatives in the attributively used participle phrases in the primed examples in (47). If the adjacency of het and the determiner is indeed the relevant factor, we can also account for the fact that het cannot be omitted in example (41) and the primed examples of (47). We will return to the examples in (47) in Section 26.2, sub II and III.

The second supposed case of periphrastic majorative/maximative forms involves the comparison of two adjectives; it has been claimed that this is only possible when the periphrastic majorative form is used. Consider the two examples in (48).

Again, it is not obvious that the examples in (48) are periphrastic majorative phrases. A first reason for doubt is that these examples seem to be more concerned with the appropriateness of the terms used than with degrees: meer in (48) can easily be replaced by eerderrather, as in (49), which is never possible with true majoratives.

To the extent that the examples in (50) are intelligible, eerder must be translated as temporal sooner, which yields a pragmatically odd result, since we are dealing here with individual-level adjectives; note that the temporal reading of the primed examples becomes more prominent when we use the past tense.

Second, the two examples in (51) involve a syntactic frame similar to that of the examples in (48), although the adjectives are replaced by noun phrases and PPs, respectively. Obviously, the examples in (48) and (51) should receive a similar description, which casts serious doubt on any attempt to analyze the examples in (48) as cases of periphrastic comparatives.

For completeness’ sake, note that the above discussion is not intended to suggest that comparison of two adjectives is impossible, which is clearly not true; cf. Section 26.1.4. It only shows that the examples under discussion are not cases of periphrastic majoratives. Instead of being part of a periphrastic comparative, meer acts as an independent clause adverbial, such as eerder. For instance, the (a)-examples in (48) and (49) can be paraphrased as in (52a); cf. adverbial tests. The examples in (52b&c) show that similar paraphrases are possible for the examples in (51).