Understanding which events are mentioned in unstructured natural language texts, and which relations connect them is a fundamental task for many applications in natural language processing (NLP), such as personalized news systems, question answering and summarization. A notably challenging problem related to event processing is recognizing the relations that hold between events, in particular temporal and causal relations. Having knowledge about such relations is necessary to build event timelines from text and could be useful for future event prediction, risk analysis and decision making support. While there has been some research on temporal relations, the aspect of causality between events from an NLP perspective has hardly been touched, even though it has a long-standing tradition in psychology and formal linguistic fields. We propose an annotation scheme to cover different types of causality between events, techniques for extracting such relations and an investigation into the connection between temporal and causal relations. The latter will be the focus of this thesis work because causality clearly has a temporal constraint. We claim that injecting this precondition may be beneficial for the recognition of both temporal and causal relations.