Cause and Condition in Time Clauses

Time clauses can express a wide range of semantic relations other than time. This is due to the fact that the conjunctions alone are not responsible for the temporal meaning of the complex sentence with time clauses, on the contrary; other factors such as the extralinguistic context, the internal dynamics of the actions in the main and subordinate clause, and the meanings of predicates also influence the overall interpretation of the sentence. Because of the overlapping of temporal meaning with other shades of meaning, time clauses can present semantic implications of cause, condition, result, purpose, concession, reason, contrast, etc. These shades of meaning sometimes add up to the temporal meaning, coexisting with it, and sometimes they totally rule out temporal meaning, altering the semantic content of the conjunction itself. This paper aims at pointing out the variety of semantic relations expressed by time clauses in English and Albanian, as well as identifying the mechanisms responsible for the complete or partial overshadowing of temporal meaning in these clauses.