  (Abridged) The building blocks of galaxies are star clusters. These form with
low-star formation efficiencies and, consequently, loose a large part of their
stars that expand outwards once the residual gas is expelled by the action of
the massive stars. Massive star clusters may thus add kinematically hot
components to galactic field populations. This kinematical imprint on the
stellar distribution function is estimated here by calculating the velocity
distribution function for ensembles of star-clusters distributed as power-law
or log-normal initial cluster mass functions (ICMFs). The resulting stellar
velocity distribution function is non-Gaussian and may be interpreted as being
composed of multiple kinematical sub-populations. The notion that the formation
of star-clusters may add hot kinematical components to a galaxy is applied to
the age--velocity-dispersion relation of the Milky Way disk to study the
implied history of clustered star formation, with an emphasis on the possible
origin of the thick disk.
