A shared feature of the Germanic languages is the occurrence of complex verbs consisting of the verb itself and what I refer to as the adverbal unit (AU). I examine the nature of the units that can be inserted into such complex verbs and compare intercalation patterns in AU-Vs and V-AUs. AU-Vs are found to be much more resistant to intercalation than V-AUs. The former accommodate the past participle marker, the infinitival linker, and—less commonly—verbs, whereas the latter accommodate NPs, ADVPs, and—less commonly—both phrase types concurrently. Thus, V-AUs may be split by more syntactic as well as heavier material than AU-Vs. I argue that this difference in cohesiveness is due to varying degrees of coactivation of Vs and AUs. The constituents of AU-Vs show a higher degree of coactivation than those of V-AUs. Adverbal units depend for their activation on the prior activation of verbs more than verbs depend for their activation on the prior activation of adverbal units. These different activation patterns lead to different degrees of cohesiveness and hence to different intercalation possibilities in the two verb types. Although intercalation is compulsory in some contexts, it proves to be a dispreferred option.*

Ramsey’s theorem states that for any coloring of the n-element subsets of ℕ with finitely many colors, there is an infinite set H such that all n-element subsets of H have the same color. The strength of consequences of Ramsey’s theorem has been extensively studied in reverse mathematics and under various reducibilities, namely, computable reducibility and uniform reducibility. Our understanding of the combinatorics of Ramsey’s theorem and its consequences has been greatly improved over the past decades. In this paper, we state some questions which naturally arose during this study. The inability to answer those questions reveals some gaps in our understanding of the combinatorics of Ramsey’s theorem.