The examples in (19) show that past and passive participles can normally appear either before or after the perfect/passive auxiliary.

A complicating factor is that past/passive participles sometimes exhibit adjectival behavior, as evidenced by the fact that they can be used in prenominal attributive position, which is normally reserved for adjectives; this is shown for the participle getrouwdmarried in the primeless examples in (20). That the participle is adjectival in nature in these examples is also clear from the fact that it has an adjectival ending: in indefinite singular noun phrases headed by a neuter noun it is inflected by the null affix -Ø, whereas in all other cases it is inflected by -e; cf. Section A23.2. The examples in (20) illustrate this only for the neuter noun stelcouple; we have added examples with the adjective aardignice for comparison.

The adjectival use of the past/passive participle is easy to see in examples such as (20), where it is used as a prenominal attributive modifier, but it is more difficult in other cases. Consider the examples in (21). Example (21a) has two interpretations that can be brought to the fore by adverbial modification. Example (21b) shows that (21a) can have an activity reading, which can be enhanced by using a temporal adverbial phrase like gisterenyesterday that refers to a relatively short time interval, and example (21c) shows that it also has a property reading which can be brought to the fore by adverbial phrases like nog steedsstill.

We can account for these two readings of (21a) by assuming that this example is structurally ambiguous: in its activity reading we have a perfect-tense construction with the verbal complex is getrouwd (i.e. with a verbal participle), whereas in the property reading we have a copular construction with a complementive (i.e. with an adjectival participle). That this distinction is in the right direction is also clear from example (22): since the prefix on- can only occur with adjectives, we correctly predict that it will be blocked by the presence of an adverbial phrase such as gisterenyesterday. See Chapter A31 for further discussion.

We now also correctly predict that the participle in (21a) has the distribution of an adjectival complementive when an adverbial phrase like nog steedsstill is present: unlike the verbal past participle in (23a), the adjectival participle in (23b) must occur left-adjacent to the clause-final verbs.

The claim that we are dealing with an adjectival participle in examples such as (23b) is important, because it allows us to formulate the word-order generalization in (24) that past/passive participles can either precede of follow their auxiliary.

Note that the case discussed in this subsection is just one instantiation of a larger set of constructions that may involve adjectival participles; we refer the reader to Sections 6.2.3 and 2.5.1.3, sub IID, for a discussion of other cases.

Te-infinitives usually follow their governing verb. This is illustrated in the examples in (25) for the modal verb lijken and the semi-aspectual verb zitten.

A complicating factor is that te-infinitives are like past/passive participles in that they sometimes exhibit adjectival behavior. Example (26a) clearly shows that they can be used in prenominal attributive position, which is normally reserved for adjectives. Example (26b) shows that these so-called modal infinitives are also used as complementives: like ordinary (adjectival) complementives, they must precede the finite verb in clause-final position. For a detailed discussion of modal infinitives, see Chapter A31.

The claim that we are dealing with adjectival te-infinitives in examples such as (26) is important because it allows us to set aside such cases as irrelevant for the description of verb clusters and to formulate the word-order generalization in (27) that te-infinitives must follow their governing verb, without any exception clauses.

The case of modal infinitives seems to be just one instantiation of a larger set of te-infinitives that can be used as complementives; another typical example is given in (28), which is again characterized by the fact that the te-infinitive exhibits the prototypical behavior of complementives that they occur left-adjacent to the clause-final verbs; we refer the reader to Section 6.2.3 for more examples of this kind and for more detailed discussion.

The distribution of bare infinitives seems to be somewhat more complex than that of participles and te-infinitives. Although they usually follow their governing verb, they can also precede it as a stylistically marked option, provided that the verb cluster consists of no more than two verbs. Thus, while (29a) has the option of placing the verb zwemmento swim before its governing verb gaanto go, this order is unacceptable in clusters with more than two verbs, as in (29b).

A complicating factor is that bare infinitives can also be used as nominalizations, as illustrated in (30), for which a nominalization analysis seems to be the only viable one, given that zwemmen functions as the subject of the clause; cf. Sections N14.3.1.2 and N15.2.3.2 for a detailed discussion of this kind of bare-inf nominalization.

Of course, the possibility of nominalization does not pose a problem for aspectual non-main verbs such as gaanto go in (29), since such verbs cannot take nominal complements. However, the situation is different for verbs such as lerento learn/teach, which can take a noun phrase as complement. The examples in (31) show that zwemmen can be used with such verbs in the same positions as the noun phrase iets nieuwssomething new.

Since (29b) has shown that bare infinitives must follow their governing verbs in clusters of three verbs, the acceptability of (31b) with zwemmen would be very surprising if zwemmen were part of the verb cluster, but it falls into place quite naturally if we consider it a nominalization.

Example (32a) shows that zwemmen does not have to precede the clause-final verb, but can also follow it. We have indicated by subscripts that this goes hand in hand with a difference in categorial status of the bare infinitive: if it follows the verb leren, it is not a nominalization but a regular verb. This difference in categorial status can be made visible by the distribution of the IPP-effect in the corresponding perfect-tense examples: if the bare infinitive following leren is truly verbal, we expect the IPP-effect; if the bare infinitive preceding leren is nominal, we expect it to be incompatible with the IPP-effect. The (b)-examples in (32) show that these expectations are borne out.

We refer the reader to Section 5.2.3.1 for a more detailed discussion of the differences in the syntactic behavior of verbal and nominal bare infinitives. Here we will simply repeat the tests proposed there for determining the categorial status of bare infinitives.

	infinitival clause	nominalization
is part of the verbal complex	+	—
precedes/follows the governing verb	normally follows	precedes
triggers IPP-effect	+	—
allows focus movement	—	+
may follow negation expressed by niet ‘not’	+	—
can be preceded by the article geen ‘no’	—	+

Now that we have shown that examples in which bare infinitives precede the clause-final verbs must be instances of nominalizations, we can put forward the generalization in (34). The part between parentheses is added to allow the option that bare infinitives precede their governing verb in clusters of no more than two verbs; we will return to that issue in Section 7.3.

The progressive aan het + Vinf + zijn construction is problematic in the sense that it is not clear what the exact syntactic status of the aan het + Vinf sequence is. Section 1.5.3, sub I, argues that there are reasons to assume that it is a complementive PP headed by the preposition aan, but that there are also reasons to assume that it is merely a non-finite form of the verb. Although we have left the issue open, we will not include the progressive construction in our discussion of verb clusters for the simple reason that the aan-phrase has the external distribution of a complementive: example (35b) shows that the sequence aan het wandelen must precede the clause-final verbs, which is surprising in view of the fact that verbs generally follow their governing verb. The proposal that the aan-PP is a complementive PP also accounts for the fact, illustrated in (35c), that the verb zijn appears as a past participle in the perfect tense; if aan het + Vinf were a non-finite verb form, we would wrongly expect the infinitive wezento be, since such complex perfect-tense constructions normally exhibit the IPP-effect. For completeness, (35c') shows that the sequence aan het + Vinf cannot follow the clause-final verbs in the perfect tense either.

This section has shown that past/passive participles and (te-)infinitives can be nonverbal in nature: participles and te-infinitives sometimes exhibit adjectival behavior, and bare infinitives can be nominalized. This means that we must be careful before concluding that such elements are part of a verb cluster because they can also function as a complementive or simply head a nominal direct object. This provides a solid ground for excluding such cases from the discussion of verb clusters.