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I want to use "since" meaning "after" not "because".

  1. I haven't seen her since she works there

  2. I haven't seen her since she is working there

  3. I haven't seen her since she has been working there.

  4. I haven't seen here since she was working there

The reason I'm asking is because I have seen such sentences only with past simple and past perfect simple. To me my 4 versions are also fine and mean more or less the same. Still, I'm not a native so please comment on them.

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  • 1, 2 - NO. 3, 4 - OK.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Jun 24 at 9:58
  • Setting aside Michael Harvey's concerns, I would say that all 4 examples are ambiguous to some extent. You can substitute the word "because" for "since" and not change the meaning if that is what you intended. On the other hand substituting "after", although a bit awkward sounding to a native speaker, also works. Something like " Since / after she started working there I have not seen her" may be better.
    – Peter Jennings
    Commented Jun 24 at 10:37
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    All four are both unnatural and ambiguous. If you mean 'because', you should use that word.
    – Michael Harvey
    Commented Jun 24 at 11:16
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    If your main goal is to learn how tenses work in English, I’d suggest you say so. If, instead, your goal is to express a particular thought in idiomatic English, then you can avoid all the tense issues that your examples are raising for you. How about I haven’t seen her since she started working there?
    – Paul Tanenbaum
    Commented Jun 24 at 11:35
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    Your 1 and 2 don’t work because sentences of the form I haven’t done X since Y, where since is used in its temporal sense rather than its conjunctive sense, carry the implicit semantic requirement that Y have already happened.
    – Paul Tanenbaum
    Commented Jun 24 at 11:39

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I'm not feeling terribly confident, since several commenters have defended it, but I'm not sure that #3 works either. I'm going to tentatively say that "since," in the meaning you want, is about the past, so only past tenses work.

Something similar to #3 is "I haven't seen her since she has started working there." To my mind, that works, since it speaks of a discrete moment in the past. It implies that her work is ongoing in the present, but the start of her work is a past moment. Of course, I don't know why anyone would say this, instead of "...since she started working there."

In short: You say "I have seen such sentences only with past simple and past perfect simple." I think there's a good reason for that. Note, this isn't so much about grammar as about ideas. Don't get the idea that "there's a rule that 'since' takes certain tenses." Rather, it's: "This meaning of 'since' is about discrete moments in the past. So it's hard to use it with verb tenses that don't handle that idea."

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