El estudio de la sintaxis infantil a partir del diálogo con ni？os: Aportes metodológicos

in the literature about children syntactic development, particularly during last four decades, it's been frequently read that studies sustain on spontaneous speech samples, i.e., daily dialogic instances between children or between children and adults, are problematic because it's necessary to have a considerable amount of children talk to pick up the syntactic forms in study and carry out a statistical analysis (demuth, 1996). besides some studies consider that samples does not represent child language uses but some specific usages (chomsky, 1969), and so the results lacks of validity and are only descriptions of syntactic tendencies (lust, flynn, & foley, 1996) or that the data are spurious because in spontaneous contexts is difficult to control the interference of contextual variables (echeverría, 1978). however there is consensus about the fact that these samples provide rich qualitative data. in order to pose an alternative to this methodological controversy, this paper presents a semistructured interview design that seeks to preserve the distinctive characteristics of conversational exchanges but allows obtaining a sizeable amount of children syntactic data, to make a comparison between subjects and statistical processing. the design takes into account the contributions of a group of cognitive perspectives about the processes by which the subjects produce, comprehend, acquire, and develop language: cognitive linguistic (lakoff, 1987; langacker, 1987), mental cognitive frames and spaces theory (fauconnier, 1985), gramaticalization theory (hopper, 1998), and language usage model (tomasello, 2001). also it considers some methodological criteria from sociolinguistics (labov, 1991; lavandera, 1984), ethnography of speaking (gumperz, 1982), functionalist perspective on language development (karmiloff-smith, 1986), and a set of criteria developed in a previous exploratory research (silva, 2001). we select interview because it's recognized that it's the situation whic