TIME SUBORDINATORS AND TIME RELATIONS IN ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN

Abstract

Language in general is a complex apparatus of the human beings through which we express our inner
feelings, thoughts and ideas. This study was initiated due to the importance of language in general. However, to
know a language does not only mean to know its vocabulary, but how to link the words, the word order in a clause
as well as the order of clauses in a sentence, their role and their relations to each other. The relationship of the
clauses in a sentence is especially important concerning complex sentences, in which the clauses are not of the same
level but show a dependency. So, precisely the adverbial clauses of time are the ones that are highly complicated and
create confusion. For this reason, most of the people try to avoid them, and use simple clauses instead, nevertheless,
this somehow loses the meaning and originality of the idea. This means that although complex, adverbial clauses of
time are crucial in explaining our ideas and thoughts. Based on the great number of the adverbial clauses of time, on
the meanings that they convey as well as on the manner how the meaning is expressed, this study will concentrate on
a contrastive analysis of the adverbial clauses of time in English and Albanian. It will focus on the time relations that
time subordinators of time express in both languages. The methodology that is used in this paper is mainly
descriptive and comparative. The paper is based on the analysis of Jack London’s novel White Fang which was
translated into Albanian under the title Dhëmbi i Bardhë by Bujar Doko. A comparison of the adverbial clauses of
time in both languages is done in order to find their differences and commonalities. Afterwards, a detailed
description of the data extracted from the comparison is carried out, which will play a major role in proving the
hypothesis and coming to a conclusion. The general hypothesis of this study is that most of the adverbial clauses of
time as well as their subordinators will be equivalent in both English and Albanian. The results of the analysis show
that adverbial clauses of time do have a similar structure as well as correspondence in English and Albanian: the
overall structure of both English and Albanian adverbial clauses of time is the same; the subordinators in both
languages correspond to their counterparts in expressing time relations, being a fixed time, duration, simultaneity,
anteriority or posteriority; both types of clauses are movable, which means that they can take the initial, medial and
final position in a sentence; and the use of commas is the same as well. There is also a similarity in the word order
of the time clauses. Another similar feature of the adverbial clauses of time in both English and Albanian is that they
are expressed by finite and non-finite clauses.