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Abstract This article examines methodologies for studying variation in partitives. It focuses on the challenges for languages with rich nominal morphology. Translation questionnaires have been widely and efficiently applied for discovering variation in Germanic and Romance partitives. We set up a mini questionnaire and provide its answers for Estonian to test the method. The current research situation of the Estonian morphological partitive case variation allows us to spot some inadequacies of this research instrument. We show the complexity of partitive variation across linguistic modules and discuss how the works presented in this volume as well as other related recent research may provide ancillary instruments to mitigate the shortcomings of a translation questionnaire. We close the discussion with some methodological alternatives open to morphologically complex languages in their typical research situations, applied to Beserman pseudo partitives and Ukrainian partitive genitives, and some synergies in recently applied methods.
Anne Tamm (Wed,) studied this question.