The paper reviews the research status of English and Chinese causatives at home and abroad, and examines the related researches on the comparative study between English and Chinese causatives.The research on English causatives is mainly concerned with causative verbs and conceptual meaning, and Chinese causatives involve conceptual meaning, research scope,semantic and syntactic features.By reviewing the previous researches,this paper pointes out the existing problems in causative research and provides some suggestions for further research.