Participles are not the only verbal elements that can be used attributively: te-infinitives can also be used this way, as shown by the examples in (92).

The verbs that can enter this construction are limited to those that take an accusative object, i.e. intransitive and unaccusative verbs cannot occur in this construction. This is shown in (93).

Since the head noun in (92) corresponds to the direct object of the active counterpart of the infinitival verb, the impossibility of (93a) is to be expected. The unacceptability of (93b&c), on the other hand, is surprising, since attributively used past/passive participles can modify both the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an unaccusative verb; cf. Section 31.2.2. One possible approach to account for the unacceptability of these examples is to appeal to the fact that the construction expresses a notion of obligation (cf. Subsection II), which must be attributed to some (implicit) [+human] argument in the structure. However, such an approach would still leave examples such as (94) unaccounted for, for which a [+human] argument is available.

Example (95) with the unaccusative verb verschijnento appear is exceptional in that it is considered acceptable by many Dutch speakers, which may be due to English influence. Note that this example is also exceptional in that it does not express the root modality of ability or obligation but future aspect.

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

Since modal infinitives usually end in a schwa (orthographically represented as -en), they do not get the attributive -e ending; cf. Section 27.1.1, sub II. Nevertheless, the acceptability of the examples in (102) shows that it is justified to treat them on a par with the attributively used adjectives, since coordination is usually restricted to elements of the same category, or at least to elements with the same syntactic function: cf. Section C39.4.3, sub I. The fact that modal infinitives can be coordinated with APs is a robust indication that they have the same syntactic status; this is illustrated in (102a) and (102b) for modal infinitives in their verbal and nonverbal readings, respectively.

Since the infinitival form of contraction verbs such as ontslaanto lay off does not end in schwa, we might expect such verbs to occur in attributive position with the attributive -e ending. However, example (103a) shows that this is not the case: they are excluded regardless of whether they are inflected or not. This is all the more surprising, since (103b) shows that they can easily be used in predicative position.

Example (104) provides a number of acceptable examples of attributively used modal infinitives based on contraction verbs with an (adjectival) ability reading; cf. Haeseryn et al. (1997). Since these cases have an idiomatic ring to them, we may be dealing with fully lexicalized formations.

We have given the te-phrases the label modal infinitives, because te is an infinitive marker and the following element has the appearance of an infinitive. However, this label may be controversial from a comparative perspective, however, since 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 (105), where the inflection is given in italics.