The absolute zonder-construction seems more restricted than the absolute met-construction: it appears to be felicitous only with locational adpositional phrases and intransitive prepositions.

Directional adpositional phrases like (129a), and predicates of other categories do not seem to be possible. Given examples such as without the chairman present we cannot start the meeting, English is more permissive in this respect.

A potential problem for the claim that predicative als-phrases like als voorzitter in (129c) cannot be used as the predicative part of the absolute zonder-construction is that Haeseryn (1997: 929) gives example (130a) as grammatical. It is not entirely clear, however, whether this is indeed an absolute zonder-construction, because example (131a) below will show that proper nouns do not give rise to fully acceptable results in this construction. Perhaps, the als-phrase must be seen as a modifier of the proper noun. That this is an option is illustrated in (130b). Since we have no further insights to offer, we leave the analysis of this example to future research.

      Not only is there a restriction on the type of predicate, there also seems to be a restriction on the nominal part of the construction. Proper nouns, pronouns and definite noun phrases and interrogative phrases all give rise to a degraded result, and, to a lesser degree, the same thing seems to hold for quantified noun phrases. Demonstrative and indefinite noun phrases, on the other hand, are fully acceptable. Surprisingly, absolute zonder-constructions differ from absolute met-constructions in that they allow and, in fact, typically occur with a bare singular noun as their nominal part; compare (131g) with (95g).

Finally, it can be noted that zonder licenses negative polarity items like ook maar (iets)'any(thing)' or een cent'a single penny'. This is illustrated in (132).