The aim of this paper is to explore the way in which grammatical aspect interacts with lexical aspect and the way in which the meaning of the grammatical category is affected.

A study of this interaction is lacking from almost all analyses of Aspect in Modern Greek, an otherwise much-studied area in recent years. The meaning of verbs is by definition at least partly aspectual. Obviously, since verbs denote states or actions, and these necessarily occupy a time chunk, they invariably make some kind of statement as to the internal structure of each action or state; for instance, they may put emphasis on the continuity of a situation, or on the moment in time where there is a change of state. This fact is ignored by most authors. There are exceptions: Tzartzanos (1946: 257), eg, did not fail to point out the fact that the meaning of each stem is determined partly by the meaning of individual verbs, but neither he nor most of his successors explored this relationship further. 1 The verb yrafo'write'(as a transitive) carries every single distinction in the Modern Greek verbal system: Aorist and Present Subjunctive, Aorist and Paratatikos, Aorist and Perfect, the so-called Perfect A and Perfect B; but yrafo belongs to a certain group of verbs which denote a developing action with an end point. So of course eyrafa'wrote-I (imp.)'has all the possible meanings of the imperfective past, showing either habituality or continuity, whether progressive or not, as opposed to eyrapsa'wrote-I (perf)', which looks at the action as a whole, without being interested in its internal structure. 2 And of course exo yrafti and ime yramenos have essentially the same meaning (except that the former can have a meaning of iterativity from which the latter is excluded,