Sociative causation is a semantic type of causation where the causer not only makes the causee do an action, but also participates in it The typological literature usually presents it either as a semantic extension of a regular causative or, when a specific marker exists for sociative causative, as a rare particularity. This paper presents a preliminary cross-linguistic investigation on the means of expression of sociative causation in a range of non-genetically related languages. A first significant result is that specific markers for sociative causation are widespread in South America and could probably be seen as an areal feature. Another major point is that data on sociative causation expressed by applicative markers hint to a possible reconsideration of the hypothetical direction of semantic extension of causative to applicative via sociative causation.