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 arising and recently
applied methods.
