Semantic properties of habban+participle II in Old English and haben+participle II in Old High German are investigated in this study with special emphasis on contexts where these constructions are used together with preterits: e.g. Old English Annania, deofol bepæhte đine heortan, and đu hæfst alogen þam Halgan Gaste ‘Annania, devil has deceived you, and you have lied to the Holy Spirit’ and Old High German ih haben iz funtan in mir, ni fand ih liebes uuiht in thir ‘I have found it in me, I have not found anything lovely in you’. An in-depth analysis of the contexts shows that a functional overlap of two verb forms (preterital verbs and analytical constructions) becomes possible due to the fact that the constructions did not yet develop semantic and functional properties of the fully-fledged perfect, whereas completion of the eventuality could be conveyed by lexical and morphological means of the preterit, in particular, through such morphological means as perfectivizing prefixes. Specific ways of conveying L