Synchronic comparison of the semantics and pragmatics of the current forms of praeterito-praesentia verbs in German and English, reveals a complex pattern of similarities and differences. Whilst the base forms from original preterites have been thoroughly studied, the 'oblique' innovated preterites have received far less attention. As these oblique forms provide a greater distribution of meaning-use correlations than related non-oblique forms, their semantic specifications cannot be mere projections of those of the related non-oblique forms, and rather different pragmatic constraints are required to account for them.