A linguistic questionnaire is a set of items – called “questions” for short – about how certain things are expressed in the target language. There are different kinds of questions and of questionnaires:
- The questionnaire may consist in a set of example sentences of the lingua franca, to be translated into the target language; and then it is methodologically no different from the example-translation method.
- The stimuli may be non-linguistic in nature, e.g. pictures. They are provided with a pertinent instruction, for instance to name the denotatum visible on the picture.
- The questions may be properly linguistic (or metalinguistic), of the kind “Is the possessive attribute of an inalienable body part ordered before or after the head noun?”, which only a linguist can answer.