Dear Basil Ganglia,
A very belated reply and thank you for your post to my thread!
I have also understood that the use of the preterite indicates that the person might have passed away. Recently, however, I heard on Spanish-language television a commercial for an art school and in the voice over a woman said "
Siempre supe que quise
ser artista". So, I wonder if there is something about the pairing of "siempre" and the preterite.
Similarly, I read another story in which a person who was still alive was described:
"Yo era un joven introvertido, pero en cambio, mi mujer siempre fue ambiciosa."
I was perplexed by the use of "fue".
I did a bit more reading about "siempre" as a time marker and verbs whose actions cannot be counted.
Actions that one can repeatedly do such as "go to the beach", "Siempre íbamos a la playa en julio" fit the traditional explanation given to English-language speakers, that siempre is associated with repeated actions in the past. However, if the action is not something for which on could count a certain number of repetitions, knowing (saber) for example, might "siempre" function less as a marker of repetition but more as a time marker that helps encapsulate the past into a completed whole?