The Correlation of Tenses in English and Albanian Time Clauses

Abstract

This paper discusses the typical tenses used in the main clause and time clause, and the semantic-grammatical interpretations indicated by such tense correlations. According to the results of the corpus analysis, the most frequent tense correlation in time clauses of anteriority is past perfect–past simple; simultaneity clauses, on the other hand, are usually characterized by the combination of past continuous-past simple; while relations of posteriority are usually expressed by the correlation of past simple-past simple. Thus, we can say that the correlation of tenses and moods of predicates is of high importance in strengthening temporal relations in complex sentences with time clauses.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2013.v2n2p311