  This paper includes a reflection on the role of networks in the study of
English language acquisition, as well as a collection of practical criteria to
annotate free-speech corpora from children utterances. At the theoretical
level, the main claim of this paper is that syntactic networks should be
interpreted as the outcome of the use of the syntactic machinery. Thus, the
intrinsic features of such machinery are not accessible directly from (known)
network properties. Rather, what one can see are the global patterns of its use
and, thus, a global view of the power and organization of the underlying
grammar. Taking a look into more practical issues, the paper examines how to
build a net from the projection of syntactic relations. Recall that, as opposed
to adult grammars, early-child language has not a well-defined concept of
structure. To overcome such difficulty, we develop a set of systematic criteria
assuming constituency hierarchy and a grammar based on lexico-thematic
relations. At the end, what we obtain is a well defined corpora annotation that
enables us i) to perform statistics on the size of structures and ii) to build
a network from syntactic relations over which we can perform the standard
measures of complexity. We also provide a detailed example.
