VP word order variation and verbal clusters in Late Modern Swedish

Some Germanic languages (e.g. German) have a VP structure where multiple verbs behave as an inseparable unit, i.e. a verbal cluster, and some (e.g. English) do not. This seems to be at least partially connected to OV versus VO word order. In this article, I use the Basic Branching Constraint (e.g. Haider 2013) and Late Modern Swedish data to argue that clustering is universal if a main verb (V) precedes an auxiliary (Aux), but a language-specific property at most if Aux precedes V. VP word order in the history of Swedish indicates that there is no immediate connection between OV and clustering; on the contrary, as OV disappeared, evidence for cluster breaking clearly dropped in frequency.