In Spanish, aspectual morphology is a critical element that speakers use to narrate and discuss past events. Previous qualitative accounts have shown that native Spanish-speakers apply past-tense aspectual morphology to verbs in order to distinguish between events viewed as perfective (bounded, discrete events) and imperfective (unbounded, durative events) (Comrie 1976, Dahl 1985, inter alia), as well as foregrounded and backgrounded actions (Hopper 1979b, 1982). Along with grammatical aspect, one must also consider how the inherent meaning of the verb plays a role in the use and understanding of past-tense narration. Yet, if the lexical aspect of a verb indicates an ongoing state (e.g. ser ‘be’, estar ‘be’), how is the meaning of the verb interpreted when applied with perfective aspect? In other words, since verbs of state are more naturally applied with imperfective aspect (cf. Hopper 1982), what is the discourse function of the perfective-stative combination in natural face-to-face discourse and what are the contextual and extra-linguistic factors conditioning this use?

The data considered in the present investigation were taken from a corpus of 25 sociolinguistic interviews in Salamanca, Spain, collected by the author in the summer of 2008. All tokens of past-tense aspectual morphology (Preterit, Imperfect, and Present Perfect) were extracted from the salmantino corpus (N=4511) and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Variable rule analyses using GoldVarb X (D. Sankoff, Tagliamonte & Smith 2005) revealed that temporal adverbials and grammatical person conditioned the use of stative verbs in the perfective form. Other linguistic factors were found to influence aspectual choice, but these constraints were not uniform for the four most frequent stative verbs (i.e., ser, estar, tener ‘have’, haber ‘be, exist’). The social and stylistic factors did not show a systematic influence on determining aspectual choice in past-tense morphology in salmantino Spanish. In addition, qualitative narrative analysis uncovered that speakers can use perfective aspect to convey subjective viewpoints.