Staan/Zijn te + Infinitive: Modal Passive (Er is veel te doen)

There is a small family of Dutch sentences that look harmless — a form of zijn, staan, or vallen, then te, then an infinitive — and that quietly do two grammatical jobs at once. Het huis is te koop means "the house is for sale": the house is the thing being sold (passive), and selling it is something that can or is meant to happen (modal). English needs a whole rephrase to capture that; Dutch fits it into three words. This construction is the modal passive, and once you can see it, you will spot it everywhere — in shop windows, in conversation, in newspaper headlines.

The core formula: zijn te + infinitive = "can be / is to be X-ed"

The backbone of the construction is a form of zijn + te + an active infinitive, where the subject is what receives the action, not what performs it. The infinitive stays active in form (doen, koop, zien) but is understood passively, and a layer of possibility or appropriateness rides on top.

Notice the logic in Dat is niet te doen: literally "that is not to do," but the meaning is "that cannot be done." The subject dat is the patient — the thing that would get done — and is te doen says doing it is not within reach. This is why we call it a passive: the grammatical subject is the undergoer. And it is modal because the construction adds "can / must / is to be," depending on context.

The fossilised pair every learner needs: te koop and te huur

Two of these phrases are so frozen and so frequent that you should simply memorise them as vocabulary. They sit on signs across every Dutch town.

Te koop = "for sale," te huur = "for rent." Note the orthography: it is koop and huur, never koopen or huren in this phrase — these are the bare noun-like infinitive forms locked into the idiom, written as two separate words after te. There is no equivalent compact English form; "for sale" and "for rent" are the closest, and they are themselves a little idiomatic.

staan / liggen / zitten te: the same idea with a posture verb

You can swap zijn for a positional verb — staan, liggen, zitten — and the modal-passive reading survives, now with a faint sense of "is positioned / available to be X-ed." Te koop staan is more idiomatic than te koop zijn for goods physically on offer.

Be careful: the same positional-te pattern also builds an ordinary progressive ("Hij staat te roken" = "he's standing there smoking"), which is a different construction covered on Positional Verbs + te. The modal-passive reading appears specifically with verbs like koop, huur, and a patient subject; the progressive appears with an agent subject who is doing the action. Context tells them apart instantly for a native speaker.

vallen te + infinitive: "there is X to be done"

Vallen lends the construction a slightly more neutral, observational flavour — "it turns out that X can be ...-ed" or "there is X to be ...-ed." It pairs constantly with er and a quantity word (veel, weinig, niets).

Dat valt te bezien is a fixed, very common phrase meaning "that remains to be seen" — a polite way of signalling doubt. Er valt veel te leren literally is "there falls much to learn," i.e. "there is much that can be learned." The vallen variant is especially natural when you are weighing possibilities aloud.

The "er is niets aan te doen" frame

One frame deserves its own spotlight because it is heard daily: er is niets aan te doen — "there's nothing to be done about it / it can't be helped." Here aan is a stranded preposition pointing back to the situation, and te doen carries the modal passive.

You can vary the quantity word: er is weinig aan te doen ("little can be done"), er is veel aan te doen ("much can be done"). The skeleton er is [quantity] aan te [infinitive] is one of the most useful patterns to drill, because it lets you express helplessness, opportunity, and obligation with one swap of a word.

How it differs from English — and from the ordinary passive

This is where the real insight lives. English has no single construction that fuses passive voice and possibility the way Dutch does here. To translate Het is niet te repareren faithfully you must choose a paraphrase: "it can't be repaired," "it's beyond repair," "there's no fixing it." English does have one near-cousin — the to-infinitive in "a house to let," "nothing to be done," "a sight to behold" — but it is restricted and archaic-flavoured, whereas Dutch deploys its version freely in everyday speech.

It also differs from the regular Dutch passive with worden/zijn + past participle. Compare:

The worden-passive reports an actual event; zijn + participle reports the resulting state; the modal passive reports a potential — the action has not happened and may not, but it can or should. That potential meaning is exactly what the te + infinitive contributes. For the fuller map of how Dutch avoids and replaces the plain passive, see Alternatives to the Passive and the core Worden-passive.

Necessity, not just possibility

Although "can be" is the most common reading, context can push the construction toward necessity — "is to be done / must be done." This reading is frequent in instructions and formal notices (formal).

Here is in te leveren and zijn te bewaren mean "must be submitted / must be kept" — an instruction. The same surface formula thus spans "can be," "must be," and "is meant to be"; the surrounding situation decides which. Note the separable verb inleveren splits around te → in te leveren, exactly as on the Te-infinitive overview.

Common Mistakes

The errors here cluster around English speakers not yet recognising the pattern as a unit, and therefore either over-translating it or mangling its fixed members.

The single most useful habit is to hear is te, staat te koop, valt te, and er is ... aan te doen as whole pre-packaged units that mean "can / must be ...-ed," rather than parsing them word by word. Learn te koop and te huur as raw vocabulary, keep "can be ...-ed" as your default gloss, and let context tip you toward necessity when you are reading instructions.