Participles are not the only verbal elements that can be used attributively: te-infinitives can also be used in this way, as is shown by the examples in (83).

The verbs that may enter this construction are limited to those that take an accusative object; in other words, intransitive and unaccusative verbs cannot occur in this construction. This is shown in (84).

Since the head noun in (83) corresponds to the direct object of the active counterpart of the infinitival verb, the impossibility of (84a) is not very surprising. The ungrammaticality of (84b&c), on the other hand, is surprising given that attributively used past/passive participles can be used to modify both the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an unaccusative verb; cf. Section 9.2.1. One possible approach to accounting for the ungrammaticality of these examples is to appeal to the fact that the construction expresses a notion of obligation (cf, subsection III), which must be ascribed to some (implicit) +human argument in the structure. Such an approach would still leave examples such as (85) unaccounted for, where the obligation could be ascribed to the noun.

Example (86) with the unaccusative verb verschijnen'to appear' is exceptional as it is judged acceptable by many Dutch speakers, which may be due to English influence. Note that this example does not express the root modality of ability or obligation but future aspect.

Since modal infinitives end in schwa (orthographically represented as -en), they do not get the attributive ending; cf. Section 5.1.1, sub II. Still, the examples in (87) show that it is justified to treat them on a par with the attributively used adjectives. As a rule, coordination is restricted to elements of the same category or to elements that have the same syntactic function: for instance, nouns cannot be coordinated with adjectives nor with verbs. The fact that modal infinitives can be coordinated with APs strongly suggests that they have the same syntactic status. In (87a) and (87b), this is illustrated for the modal infinitives on their verbal and nonverbal readings, respectively.

This subsection shows that there are two types of modal infinitives, which can be distinguished on the basis of meaning as well as syntactic behavior.

Contraction verbs like ontslaan'to sack' in (94a) often cannot be used in attributive position, although Haeseryn et al. (1997) provides a number of acceptable examples with the (adjectival) ability reading. Given that the acceptable examples in (94b&c) have an idiomatic ring to them, we may be dealing with fully lexicalized formations.

For completeness’ sake, we want to mention that we have called the te-phrases modal infinitives, because te is an infinitive marker and the element following it has the appearance of an infinitive. It should be noted, however, that the complement of zu in the German counterparts of these phrases has the appearance of an inflected present participle; cf. Kester (1994a). This is illustrated in (95), in which the inflection is given in italics.