In this study I examine Venezuelan children's developing abilities to use evaluative language in fictional and personal narratives. The questions addressed are: (1) How does the use of evaluative language vary in fictional and personal narratives? (2) Is there a relationship between the use of evaluative language in these two narrative genres and children's age and socio-economic status (SES)? The sample consists of 444 narratives produced by 113 Venezuelan school-age children participating in 4 narrative tasks, in which personal and fictional stories were elicited. Findings suggest that age and socio-economic status have a greater impact on the use of evaluation in fictional stories than in personal narratives. Low SES and younger children are at a greater disadvantage when performing fictional narratives than when performing personal narratives. These results strongly imply that children's narrative competence cannot be assessed in a single story-telling task, given the importance that task-related factors seem to have on narrative abilities.

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The aim of this study is to determine what linguistic resources are used for stance-taking in confrontational interactions. For this purpose, we analyze 70 argumentative sequences in spontaneous peer conversations during play situations of 4 dyads (2 mid and 2 low socio-economic status backgrounds) of 4 to 7-year-old Argentinian children. Stance-taking relies on the use of evaluative language, understood as the markers of speaker’s attitude (reference to internal states such as attribute, cognition, emotion, intention, and reported speech, [Shiro, 2003]); and the use of evidential markers, understood as speaker’s reference to the status of the information in the utterance (causality, concession, capacity, deontic and epistemic modality, and inference, [Shiro, 2007]), including markers of politeness which serve to mitigate (or intensify) the confrontation (Watts, 2003). Our findings describe the evaluative resources used for stance-taking strategies produced by children at this early age in confrontational interactions with their peers.

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Formular el problema constituye un componente necesario en el artículo de investigación, ya que devela el nuevo conocimiento que se espera generar y sustenta así el propósito que caracteriza a este género discursivo. Sin embargo, la manera de formular el problema puede variar de una disciplina a la otra. En el presente estudio me propongo comparar los recursos usados para delimitar y problematizar el objeto de estudio en artículos de investigación de varias disciplinas (ambiente, economía, educación, medicina y psicología). Es de suponer que, para la construcción discursiva del problema investigado, se debe hacer uso de los recursos evaluativos del lenguaje, puesto que, precisamente en esta formulación, el autor asume una posición determinada tanto con respecto al fenómeno estudiado como con respecto a otras investigaciones afines. Es por ello que este estudio se concentra en examinar los recursos evaluativos utilizados para plantear el problema. Los resultados muestran que los recursos utilizados no varían mucho de una disciplina a la otra. El objeto de estudio se delimita, en la mayoría de los casos, con la ayuda de un número restringido de expresiones fijas (p. ej. el objetivo fundamental del presente trabajo es…) y se problematiza usando recursos evaluativos que resaltan la importancia del problema planteado y el aporte a la disciplina.

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