Examines a computer-based corpus that provides the data for a comprehensive investigation of clitic climbing in written and spoken modern Spanish. The results are based on nearly 15,000 tokens with 32 different main verbs from a computer corpus of 3.5 million words from ten countries. Clitic climbing is more common in spoken than in written…

Emphasizes that traditional textbook explanations of the preterite and imperfect tend to focus on their aspectual differences. The article argues that a comprehensive analysis of the interaction of these two tenses in narration must go beyond aspect to include their respective temporal and discourse properties. (30 references) (Author/CK)