Inferred temporal-causal senses

Temporal-causal senses are an interesting subject: there is a linguistic device signalling a more basic temporal relation (of situations ordered in time or what is often neglected situations occuring simultaneously) and we are also able to infer that one situation has caused the other, under certain special conditions as e.g. in (1.) and (2.) but not in (3.):

1. After the truck accident the motorway was covered in chocolate. ANTERIORITY (ev1, ev2) → CAUSE (ev1, ev2)
2. Mass tourism has stopped with the Iranian Revolution. SIMULTANEITY (ev1, ev2) → CAUSE (ev1, ev2)
3. After rejecting the climate crisis plan the Venice council was flooded. ANTERIORITY (ev1, ev2)

When we look at the connective devices from a cross-linguistical perspective, it seems that their status of grammaticalization/conventionalization into markers signalling the causal relation independently, is different (cf. Table 1): German prepositions have conventionalized further when the underlying relation is simultaneity.

English and German connectives expressing temporal, temporal-causal and causal senses