The article investigates the functional characteristics of the evaluative adjectives good and bad in noun phrases with the head word question, which serves as the basic nomination of the corresponding speech act in English. The noun phrases good question and bad question are seen as part of the language inventory of folk linguistics, viewed as a set of popular beliefs about the nature and cognitive characteristics of communication units. The functional analysis of their use in anglophone non-scholarly discourse has shown that average English language speakers use these noun phrases as tools for communicative situation modelling rather than purely evaluative units.