This paper studies causative constructions in English. It sheds light on the different forms they take, their meanings as well as they pose for foreign learners of English. It also involves an appendix of suggested remedial exercises to help students overcome the difficulties of tackling those causative constructions. It is hypothesized that causatives pose considerable problems for learners of English because they are linguistically and cognitively complex, and that they are susceptible of a variety of surface syntactic expressions in English.