The position of the attributively used adjective is typically to the left of the verb(s) in clause-final position: placement of the adjective after the verb(s) leads to severe ungrammaticality. This is illustrated in (54).

There is a divide between the northern and southern varieties of Dutch with respect to the placement of the complementive when there is more than one verb in clause-final position. In the northern varieties, the adjective usually precedes all verbs. Placement of the adjective in between the auxiliary and main verb, as in the primed examples of (55), is generally rejected, although it should be noted that these orders are occasionally produced and some speakers tend to accept them as marked but acceptable. All speakers of the northern varieties of Dutch do agree, though, that making the adjective phrases in (55) more complex by, e.g., adding a complement or an intensifying adverb, such as erg'very', renders the primed examples fully unacceptable; the same thing holds for adjectives in the comparative or superlative forms.

The requirement that the verbs in clause-final position be strictly adjacent to each other does not apply to the southern varieties of Dutch. This is especially clear in the varieties of Dutch spoken in Belgium, where even in the formal registers various types of elements can be placed between the clause-final verbs. In these varieties, the orders in the primed examples in (55) are fully acceptable, even if the adjectives are modified.
      With some more or less fixed adjective-verb combinations, all speakers of Dutch accept the occurrence of the adjective in between the auxiliary and the main verb. These combinations are sometimes considered compounds, which is reflected by the orthographical convention of writing the combination as a single word in the primeless examples of (56). That we are dealing with compounds is perhaps supported by the fact that these adjective-verb combinations can be rendered by simple English verbs: to raise, to clean and to drain. It is also suggested by the fact that modification of the adjectives by, e.g., the intensifying adverb erg'very' gives rise to an awkward result, although it should be noted that assuming compounding leaves unexplained that modification is also excluded if the adjective and the verb are not adjacent, as in the primed examples (or in verb second contexts).

      If the adjective precedes the verb(s) in clause-final position, it must generally also be adjacent to it/them: intervention of elements such as adverbial phrases leads to unacceptability in all varieties of Dutch if the sentence is pronounced with an unmarked intonation pattern (with main stress on the complementive). This is illustrated in (57).

      The general rule for placement of complementive adjectives can be schematized as in (58): √ indicates the position of the complementive in the “unmarked" construction, % indicates the position where the adjective cannot occur in the northern varieties, and * marks the positions where the adjective cannot occur at all, subsection II will show, however, that several exceptions to this general schema exist. In what follows we will focus on the northern varieties of Dutch and refer to the generalization in (58) as the adjacency restriction.

Note further that, in order to be more precise, we should of course say that the adjectival phrase must be adjacent to the clause-final verb(s), since otherwise an example such as (59), in which the intervening PP is an argument of the adjective (cf. Section 2.1), would constitute a problem for this claim. For convenience, however, we will maintain our loose formulation in the following discussion.

      The fact that the adjective must be left-adjacent to the verbs in clause-final position suggests that there is some close relationship between the verb cluster and the adjective. That this is indeed the case is also clear from the fact that the adjective must be pied-piped in the case of VP-topicalization, as is illustrated in (60b-c).

The examples in (61) show that it is not impossible to separate the verb and the adjective. This frequently happens in Verb-second contexts if the main verb is finite, as in (61a). Separation may also result from leftward movement of the adjective. This is illustrated in (61b) for topicalization. The various types of leftward movement that may bring about such separation are discussed Subsection II.

The adjacency restriction between the adjective and the verb cluster can be overruled by assigning focus accent to the adjective; the primed examples in (57) improve considerably in that case. The order in these examples can be further improved by placing a focus particle like zo'that' in front of the adjective. This is illustrated in the primed examples of (62). The primeless examples show that the complementive adjective can also occupy the unmarked position.

The adjacency requirement can also be overruled by placing the adjective in clause-initial position by wh-movement or topicalization. We illustrate this in (63) by means of topicalization. The reader can construct the corresponding Wh-constructions himself by placing the interrogative intensifier hoe'how' in front of the adjective.

      These examples show that we have to revise the schema in (58) as in (64). Again, the dots represents a random string of elements, √ indicates the position of the complementive in the “unmarked" construction, % indicates the position where the adjective cannot occur in the northern varieties, and * marks the positions in which the adjective cannot occur in Standard Dutch. In addition, WH/TOP indicates the position of the adjective in topicalization or wh- constructions such as (63), and FOC indicates the position of the adjective in focus constructions such as (62); the star below FOC indicates that this position can only be filled by contrastively focused adjectives.

      In constructions with leftward movement of the adjective, the close relation between the complementive and the verb is broken. Therefore, we may expect that in such cases, VP-topicalization may strand the complementive. It is of course not possible to check this if the complementive has undergone wh-movement or topicalization itself, as the prospective landing site of the VP would already be filled then, but it is possible to check this when the adjective has undergone focus movement, since this leaves the clause-initial position free for VP-topicalization. Example (65) seems to indicate that VP-topicalization is not possible for some reason. Nevertheless, we will see in the next subsection that leftward movement of the adjective may indeed make it possible for the verb to topicalize in isolation.

Like complementives, stranded prepositions must be left-adjacent to the verb cluster in clause-final position, which means that the two compete for the same position. Nevertheless, they may co-occur in a single clause. At first sight, the ordering of the two elements seems to be free: in (66a), which contains a stranded preposition of an instrumental PP, the stranded preposition may either precede or follow the complementive, and the same thing holds for (66b), which involves the stranded preposition of a restrictive adverbial van-PP. For convenience, we have given the stranded preposition and its moved complement, the R-word waar, in italics.

The situation is, however, far more complex than the examples in (66) suggest. In fact, the general rule seems to be that the stranded preposition follows the complementive adjective. The following subsections discuss various facts supporting this claim.