In Słownik terminologii językoznawczej (Dictionary of Linguistic Terminology) edited by Z. Gołąb, A. Heinz and K. Polański, the term causativum is defined as follows:

A similar definition can be found in the Encyklopedia językoznawstwa ogólnego, however, the authors have added that:

Yet, the most suitable definition of causation can be found in Semantics by J. Lyons, who connects causation to the hypothesis on lexical distribution (component analysis). According to the author, valency as well as verb semantics, for example, убива (kills), should be described by its dependence on the verb's non-transitive construction умира (dies) (i.e. почнува да не живее (begins not to live)) from the abstract verb предизвикува (cause). By replacing the complex predicated (meaning почнува да не живее (begins not to live) with the verb умира (dies)), concurrently, we replace the construction ‘X causes Y to die’ with the construction ‘X causes – Y dies’ in which ‘causes – dies’ is lexicalizes as ‘kills’.