Practerito-praesentia verbs in Germanic languages are an interesting phenomenon diachronically. Synchronic comparison of the semantics and pragmatics of their current forms in German and English reveals a complex pattern of similarities and differences. While the base forms (from original preterites — can, may vs. kann, darf. muß, etc.) have been subjected to a fair amount of study, the ‘oblique’ forms (the innovated preterites — could, might, should, etc. vs. könnte, dürfte, sollte, müßte, etc.) have been less well aired. They are by no means simply ‘backshifted’ or ‘distanced’ forms. In this paper I shall discuss the uses of the English expressions and offer semantic specifications for them based on the account I gave in Matthews (1991) — with some revisions. I shall then adapt this framework in order to try and accommodate the German expressions. What becomes clear in both languages is that these oblique forms give a greater distribution of meaning-use correlations than related non-oblique forms (where they are still extant). In theoretical terms, this means that their semantic specifications cannot be mere projections of the semantic specifications of the related non-oblique forms, and also that rather different pragmatic constraints are needed to account for them.