ABSTRACT
For the past three decades or so, the causative construction has truly been one of the most recurrent research topics studied by linguists of diverse theoretical persuasions. In fact, the causative is a kind of ‘testing ground’ where grammatical theories are pushed to their limits or even brought to their logical conclusions. For instance, the sixties and seventies witnessed the rise and fall of Generative Semantics. For instance, the causative raises intriguing questions of theoretical significance in Government and Binding theory. Undoubtedly, the causative will continue to fascinate and preoccupy linguists of diverse theoretical backgrounds for years to come. The lexical causative represents the nil distance between the expressions of cause and effect. The syntactic causative represents the maximum distance between the two expressions. The morphological causative occupies the middle point between the lexical and syntactic causative types, as it were.
