This chapter deals with the formation and syntactic behavior of verb clusters. Verb clustering can occur when a main or non-main verb takes as its complement a non-finite verbal projection, i.e. a phrase headed by a past/passive participle (hereafter: participle phrase), a te-infinitive (te-infinitival), or a bare infinitive (bare infinitival). Some of the issues in this chapter have been discussed in more detail in the course of Section 5.2 and Chapter 6, but since verb clustering is one of the main issues in the scholarly discussion of Dutch (as well as German) syntax, we assume that readers will welcome a more concise discussion that focuses more specifically on this topic.

Some descriptions of verb clustering take it more or less for granted that any string of (putative) verbs in clause-final position can be analyzed as a verb cluster, i.e. verb clusters are assumed to occur whenever participles, te-infinitives, bare infinitives and (in embedded clauses) the finite verb occur adjacent in clause-final position. Section 7.1 will show, however, that this is not sufficient and that at least the following two facts should be considered. First, Section 5.2.2.3 has shown that the grouping of verbs in clause-final position is not only the result of verb clustering in the technical sense of the word, but can also be the result of so-called remnant extraposition. Second, Section 6.3.2 has shown that participles and (te-)infinitives sometimes exhibit nonverbal (i.e. nominal, adjectival, or adpositional) behavior. Excluding such cases greatly simplifies the discussion of verb clustering, and it allows us to describe the syntactic behavior (more precisely, the linearization) of verb clusters with the help of a small number of simple generalizations.

After discussing the ways in which we can recognize verb clusters, we will consider the order of the verbs in such clusters. There are two different concepts of order that are relevant. Section 7.2 discusses the concept of hierarchical order, which is basically derived from the selection properties of the verbs in the cluster: for example, a perfect auxiliary selects a participial phrase and is therefore superior to (i.e. in a structurally higher position than) the participle in the participle phrase: this can be represented in a bracketed structure as ... [... aux [PartP ... Part ...]] ....

Section 7.3 discusses the concept of linear order. It is crucial to note that languages such as Dutch differ from languages such as English in that the hierarchical order of verbs cannot be read from their linear order. Whereas in English the superior verb must precede the structurally more embedded verbs, verb clustering in languages such as Dutch can have the effect of disrupting this one-to-one correlation between hierarchical and linear order. This is illustrated by the (b)-examples in (1), which show that the participle gezienseen can occupy different positions in the italicized verb cluster.

Some descriptive generalizations concerning the restrictions on the linearization of verbs in Dutch verb clusters will be formulated in Section 7.3.