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Dutch is well-known for its verb clusters, as illustrated in the example Ik denk dat ik Cecilia het nijlpaard heb zien voeren. ‘I think I saw Cecilia feed the hippo.’ The verbs form a cluster at the end of the clause, where they are separated from their non-verbal dependants. Canonically a verb cluster cannot be interrupted by non-verbal elements. In addition, Infinitivus Pro Participio (IPP) shows up: The verb zien ‘see’ is selected by an auxiliary of the perfect, but appears as an infinitive and not as a past participle. Verb clustering and related phenomena such as the IPP effect have fascinated researchers for decades, as indicated by the abundant literature that is available within descriptive, theoretical and corpus linguistics. Still, many questions with respect to the description and the analysis of Dutch verb clusters remain unanswered. The research presented in this thesis addresses a number of these questions, and investigates how authentic language examples obtained from corpora can be an added value for a theoretical analysis of Dutch verb clusters.This dissertation is organized into three parts: a literature study (part I), acorpus study (part II), and a theoretical analysis (part III).Part I considers how verb clusters are described and analysed in the descriptive and theoretical literature. Chapter 1 gives a definition of verb clusters based on the literature, and points out the phenomena that are typically related to cluster formation. The most important ones include the IPP effect, the interruption of the cluster by non-verbal material, and word order variation within the cluster.The literature study addresses the following questions:- What is the set of Dutch clustering verbs?- In which cases is clustering obligatory and in which cases is it optional?- What is the link between cluster formation and the IPP effect?- What types of word order variation can be observed in Dutch verb clus-ters?- What are the conditions on cluster creeping, i.e. the interruption of thecluster by non-verbal elements?The literature study shows that the set of clustering verbs is not uniformly defined. In addition, it is illustrated that constructions with an optional IPP verb are often ambiguous between clustering and non-clustering constructions.Chapter 2 sketches the analysis of verb clusters in transformational grammar, as the first theoretical analyses of verb clusters were described in that framework. Moreover, the terminology used in descriptive and theoretical accounts in other frameworks is often based on the transformational work on verb clusters. Transformational approaches start from the assumption that verbs and their arguments form a syntactic and semantic unit in an underlying structure. By applying transformations on that structure, constructions with verb clusters are derived.Chapter 3 provides an overview of the most influential monostratal analyses of verb clusters. The focus will be on the treatments formulated within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), as this framework is also used to for the new analysis proposed in part III. In contrast to transformational grammar, verb clusters are not analysed by means of transformations, but by means of the inheritance of unsaturated valence lists. A treatment that gained a lot of attention is the argument inheritance analysis, proposed by Hinrichs & Nakazawa (1994). It extends the analysis of subject raising constructions to a more general mechanism, in which subject and complements are raised in a similar fashion. The analysis is originally formulated for German, but is adapted for the treatment of Dutch verb clusters.Part II presents a corpus-based investigation of verb clusters. By consulting treebanks, i.e. text corpora enriched with syntactic annotations, it is investigated whether and how often the phenomena described in part I occur in non-elicited language data. Chapter 4 presents the data and the methodology used for the corpus study. Chapter 5 describes and discusses the results of the treebank investigation. The main topics that will be addressed are the word order variation observed in the data, the identification of the clustering verbs, the occurrence of IPP and cluster creeping. Special attention goes out to constructions with a te-infinitive, as they are often neglected in studies on verb clusters.The investigation with respect to word order variation confirms the generalizations formulated in Broekhuis & Corver (2015): bare infinitives and te-infinitives follow their selector, while past participles can obtain other positions in the cluster. The treebank data only contain a few exceptions, which are mainly constructions in which a modal or aspectual finite verb follows its bare infinitival complement.In colloquial Dutch (mainly in Flanders) there are constructions in which the finite verb occurs as the final verb in IPP constructions. Constructions in which a te-infinitive precedes the selecting verb are not considered as instances of verb clusters, as those te-infinitives rather behave as predicative complements, or are a part of an idiomatic expression.Besides word order variation the set of clustering verbs and the the IPP verbs were identified. Not all verbs mentioned in the literature were encountered in the treebanks, which may be the result of ‘data sparseness’. In order to obtain a data-based list of those verbs, the treebank data were supplemented with attestations from the Web.A final case study describes the interruption of verb clusters by non-verbal elements, i.e. cluster creeping. As expected, this phenomenon occurs more often in spoken than in written data. The treebank investigation results in a classification of cluster creepers, based on their lexical category and their syntactic function.Part III presents a new analysis of Dutch verb clusters, formulated in HPSG. In chapter 6 it is demonstrated that the current HPSG analyses do not adequately analyse Dutch verb clusters. For instance, the argument inheritance analysis does not account for complement raising without subject raising. In addition, it poses problems in its interaction with the binding principles andthe application of the passive lexical rule.The alternative analysis presented in chapter 6 deals with those issues. It is motivated that Dutch verb clusters can be analyzed more adequately by treating subject raising and complement raising as separate mechanisms. While the subject requirements of the selected verbs are shared with the subject requirement of their selector, the complement requirements are not. Instead, the unsaturated complement list of the selected verb is directly propagated to the mother node. There is both intra- and interlingual evidence for such ananalysis. In Dutch, subject raising does not necessarily occur together with complement raising (e.g. in the case of subject control verbs). From a cross-linguistic perspective, there turn out to be languages that allow subject raising, but not complement raising (e.g. English).An important consequence of the new analysis is that it not only deals with complement raising out of verbal complements. Chapter 7 illustrates how the analysis proposed in chapter 6 extends to complement raising out of non-verbal complements, such as adjectival and prepositional phrases. The latter leads to adposition stranding. This phenomenon is spelled out in further detail, showing that raising is possible out of P-final PPs, but not out of P-initial PPs. Furthermore, it was argued that cases of complement raising should be differentiated from complement extraction.The analysis of complement raising and cluster formation is supported by treebank examples wherever possible. Especially the analysis of word order variation and cluster creeping heavily relies on observations from the treebank data. Even though the extraction of the relevant constructions is not a trivial task, it illustrates that corpus data provide a valuable means for the description and analysis of linguistic phenomena.