Chiral lagrangians describing the interactions of Goldstone bosons in
a theory possessing spontaneous symmetry breaking are effective, non-r
enormalizable field theories in four dimensions. Yet, in a momentum ex
pansion one is able to extract definite, testable predictions from per
turbation theory. These techniques have yielded in recent years a weal
th of information on many problems where the physics of Goldstone boso
ns plays a crucial role, but theoretical issues concerning chiral pert
urbation theory remain, to this date, poorly treated in the literature
. We present here a rather comprehensive analysis of the regularizatio
n and renormalization ambiguities appearing in chiral perturbation the
ory at the one-loop level. We discuss first on the relevance of dealin
g with tadpoles properly. We demonstrate that Ward identities severely
constrain the choice of regulators to the point of enforcing unique,
unambiguous results in chiral perturbation theory at the one-loop leve
l for any observable which is free from chiral logarithmic divergences
. We comment on the physical implications of these results and on seve
ral possible regulating methods that may be of use for some applicatio
ns.