The PPI-A construction displays the presence of two participles while there is only one instance of hahave. Furthermore, the participle diendone is not adjacent to hahave, since the participle kinnencould intervenes. Normally the participle is adjacent to the auxiliary of the perfect, if we abstract away from the disruptive effect of Verb-Second. Hence we conclude that the participle that is not adjacent to hahave is the parasitic participle, whereas the adjacent participle is the true participle.

The PPI-A construction is reminiscent of the A-construction. Consider a normal A-construction (2a), followed by a PPI-A construction (2b):

Impressionistically, it seems that the irrealis perfect verb of the ordinary A-construction hiehad has been broken into two elements: the irrealis verb soeshould and the perfect infinitive hawwe have.

Unlike the PPI-B construction, the PPI-A construction is not restricted to main clauses, but can also be found in embedded clauses. An example is given in (3):

Of course, it is also grammatical to replace the parasitic participle by an infinitive:

The real participle cannot be replaced by an infinitive:

It might also be questioned whether the word order in the verbal cluster reflects the hierarchical selection relation between the verbs. That is, it might be questioned whether the verb cluster is consequently head-final. It can be shown that the cluster is consistently head-final by applying an idiom test. The idiom útstean kinnecan stand does not allow any other verb to intervene, not even the auxiliary of the perfect, as shown in (6):

So, the idiom cannot be found in the logical B-construction, as shown above, which is still current in Modern Frisian (see a different B-construction: the logical B-construction). The ungrammaticality is due to the strict character of this idiom. If we replace the idiomatic verb by another verb, the sentence is fine:

The idiom will help us to determine the structure of the verb cluster. If the linear order reflects the hierarchical order, then the idiom will be able to occur in the PPI-A construction, because the auxiliary of the perfect does not structurally intervene in the idiomatic cluster. This is in fact the case, as the following sentence makes clear:

The sentence in (8) is grammatical because the auxiliary of the perfect does not structurally intervene in the idiom. Hence the order reflects the underlying hierarchical relation, whereas the morphological ending may be misleading, as happens to be the case with the parasitic participles.