A new and challenging view on verb clustering: On 'Not another book on Verb Raising' by Lotte Dros-Hendriks

This review article discusses Lotte Dros-Hendriks’ PhD thesis ‘Not another book on Verb Raising’ (2018), part of which is also published in Linguistic Variation 18 (p. 145-197) as: Sjef Barbiers, Hans Bennis, and Lotte Dros-Hendriks ‘Merging verb cluster variation’. The book provides a simple, principled account for the geographical distribution of the various word orders found in so-called “verb” clusters in the Dutch dialects. It will be shown, however, that the account is based on a number of controversial and insufficiently motivated premises. This article raises a number of potential problems for these premises, which should find a satisfactory solution before we can wholeheartedly adopt the core insights provided by this interesting work.