Abstract: This paper establishes criteria for delimiting Chinese causative alternating verbs and examines the derivation of causative alternation. By analyzing cross-linguistic and language-specific properties and reviewing the existing literature, three conditions for identifying alternating verbs are found: their variants should share the same morphological form, the alternation should involve the preposing of the theme, and they should entail both cause and change of state. Regarding derivation, statistical analysis of alternation determinants reveals pervasive lexical idiosyncrasies, substantiating the validity of a lexicon-oriented approach. Furthermore, the paper presents evidence against the postulation of the Caus head, supporting the view that anticausatives encode the CAUSE operator. This is based on evidence from the Monotonicity Hypothesis, the adverbial scope interpretations, etc. Finally, the paper identifies three types of alternative verbs in Chinese: agentive, causer and EFFECTOR alternating verbs. It is found that the first type can only describe externally caused events, while the latter two types can also describe the spontaneously occurring events. These types proposed within the framework of event semantics can capture the differences among the three types of alternating verbs and explain the connection between their variants.