The present study is based on a MA thesis submitted to the council of College of Education Ibn
Rushd University of Baghdad Iraq in 1989 for the degree of master of Arts in English Language
and Linguistics. It describes the syntactic and semantic aspects of adverbial clauses and
phrases of reason through which the English language mainly expresses the idea of causality.
Furthermore it presents the general points of causality as a philosophical context. A short
review of the traditional treatment of causality is given at first followed by the
transformational treatment. It derives some rules that transform kernel sentences into
adverbial clauses and if possible phrases of reason having the same meaning and embed them
within a matrix sentence.
