| We live in a world structured by the network of various causes. Due to the fact that causation is ubiquitous, the existence of causatives and causative constructions, no doubt, is also universal in world languages. Philosophical studies, as a matter of fact, have not found a desirable answer to the understanding of causation hitherto. Similarly, psychological and psycholinguistic studies in this arena have only revealed the fact that children may develop the concept of causation in their early years. Likewise, in the linguistic community, conventional studies, however insightful their approaches may be, have achieved no more results than merely providing specific methods to describe the various properties of causatives and causative constructions. Particularly,the efforts made by generative semanticists did enlighten the understanding of the relationship between causatives, causative constructions and other grammatical categories. Nevertheless, by attaching great importance to the autonomy of syntax, the generative linguists only adopt a synchronic view while little attention has been paid to the study of diachronic development pattern of causatives and causative constructions. What is more important, the conventional linguists all take little note of the cognitive operation of the speaker or conceptualizer in the construal of causative constructions. Thus they fail to have a comprehensive view of causatives and causative constructions. Neither will they be able to provide a feasible interpretation to the nature of causatives and causative constructions. The current research adopts a cognitive linguistic approach, which is known to have the capacity to interpret how the speaker/hearer conceptualizes the world in the construal of the world on the basis of his/her embodied experience and their operation of various cognitive principles and processes. Therefore, the current study will be able to provide a comprehensive view of how causatives and causative constructions are conceptualized or mapped into language by the conceptualizer in terms of his/her experience or perception of causative events in the world. In turn, this study will be conducive to the understanding of causatives and causative constructions in language.Furthermore, it will help to shed some new light on the understanding of the relationship between language, mind and the world as well. Finally, it will promote us a more profound understanding of cognitive linguistics and make a contribution to the development of cognitive linguistics proper. The current study is guided and conducted by the framework and major theories of cognitive linguistics. By following the major convictions of cognitive linguistics, the current study systemically incorporates into a whole body the following aspects of causatives and causative constructions: embodied experiential basis, conceptualization, subjectification,metaphorization, grammaticalization and idealized cognitive model. This dissertation is composed of eight chapters, which are roughly generalized as follows:Chapter 1 introduces the rationale, motivation, objective, research methodology, and structure of the current research. Thus it presents a general idea of the current work.Chapter 2 presents an overview of philosophical background, psychological, psycholinguistic and conventional linguistic researches on the issue under discussion. The main effort is made in the linguistic part, which consists of the following aspects: definition, morphology, semantic types, componential analysis of causatives, transformation and generation of causative constructions and typological studies. Their defects and demerits will be pinpointed and this serves as part of my motivation to conduct the current study. Chapter 3 conducts a cognitive study of the experiential basis of causative constructions, which touches upon three major aspects: the ontogenetic origin from causation in the physical world, the iconic mapping of physical causative events into causative constructions and the correlation be...
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