The purpose of the study is to identify the main syntactic features of the English and Tatar causative utterances determined by valency and semantics of the predicate, with their subsequent contrastive analysis. The article deals with features of actant organisation of utterances with semantics of causation containing names of a person in the role of the subject. Special attention is paid to similarities and differences between the English and Tatar syntactic constructions of the said semantics. Scientific novelty of the work is determined by the fact that utterances with causative semantics containing a name of a person have not been studied to a sufficient degree. As a result, it was found that valency and semantics of the verb provide a possibility of alternation of names of a person and event in the role of the subject and, therefore, determine realisation of referential or interpretational statuses of names of a person.