In this paper we have demonstrated that a lexicalist account of the Dutch verb cluster is able to deal with a variety of word order patterns typical for this construction, while at the same time overgeneration can be avoided.
There have been quite a number of proposals for a categorial analysis of Dutch cross-serial depedendencies. We believe that the proposal outlined above, which uses either polymorphic lexical category assignments [10] or recursive lexical constraints, is promising as it directly relates cross-serial word order to certain lexical entries. This is clearly desirable as the possibility of `verb raising' is definitely a lexical property. Furthermore, since the mechanims used to derive cross-serial word order are located in the lexicon, the interaction with general syntactic rules is restricted and thus there is no need for complex word order constraints to ensure that crossing word orders arise only in the context of `verb raising' verbs.